DUBLIN  Roger Cohen  

There’s no escape these days, is there? Even in the land of the “Celtic Tiger,” whose growth rates were Europe’s envy in recent years, a typical headline in The Irish Times runs: “Enveloping sense of gloom saps consumer sentiment.”

The recessionary Irish story is familiar, a mirror of developments in the United States, Britain and elsewhere: disappearing credit, plunging house prices, sapped consumer confidence, falling demand, lost jobs, and inflationary stirrings driven by record prices for oil and other commodities.

In Britain, Gordon Brown’s poll ratings are the lowest for any Prime Minister since World War II, a reflection of the woes of a service-dominated economy. He makes Bush’s popularity look enviable — an achievement. The Irish economy is expected to contract this year after growing 4.5 percent in 2007.

Bye-bye, tiger. Hello, bear.

Yes, a bear market is upon us with the Dow Jones Industrial Average now off 19.9 percent from its October record. (A bear market is typically defined as a decline of 20 percent or more.) A terrible bust is born.

But we had good times, didn’t we? Over the past decade, China, India and Russia joined global markets, doubling the labor force (at least) and changing the relationship between capital and labor in the former’s favor. Business leaders had many more cheap workers at their disposal, not least because technology eliminated distance. One result was the rich thrived.

Another was low inflation. Imports of goods produced by cheap labor in Asia ensured that: the Wal-Mart dividend spread.

But as with most things, there was another side to the coin. Those hundreds of millions of people emerging from poverty, moving to cities from central China or Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, began to consume.

They asked for wage rises. They started to eat two meals a day instead of one. They needed building materials for homes. After acquiring bicycles, they got scooters. Now they’re starting to offload scooters for cars.

These neo-consumers created new pressures, and not only on the environment: commodities went through the roof and oil hit $140.

A post-cold-war wealth shock became a resources shock. Inflation returned. That’s where we are.

But not everyone is suffering as the Dow dives. That’s worth recalling. The new consumers are still living better. I wrote a few weeks back that the world is no longer flat, it’s upside-down. In the BRIC economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — confidence persists.

There’s a reason. The four emerging behemoths’ combined reserves stand at close to $3 trillion, almost ten times where they were in 2001. Their share of world output has doubled in that period to 16 percent. The military dominance of the United States is no longer matched by economic dominance.

One way of looking at the current crisis is as an adjustment between the old economic power structures of the world and the emergent ones. It can’t be resolved by the ancien régime alone. The G-8 and permanent members of the U.N. Security Council must be expanded to reflect today’s realities.

One such reality is debt-ridden America’s economic vulnerability. Many politicians, including Missouri’s Republican governor, Matt Blunt, have been protesting the $46.6 billion bid by a Belgian-Brazilian company for Anheuser-Busch, maker of Budweiser.

This Bud’s for who? How can Bud fall to foreigners?

I’ve got a message for panicked U.S. Budists: get used to it. InBev’s bid for an American icon, championed by a Brazilian chief executive, won’t be the last as the cash-rich of an upside-down world prowl for acquisitions.

We in the West should be familiar with the predator instinct. I lunched early last year with Walter Eberstadt, a wise old Lazard hand, now retired. “Years ago, I watched a man flogging a horse, and finally the horse just lay down and died,” he told me. “And that horse is our financial system. We’re driving it beyond the limit. We’re living as if it can produce more energy than it is able to do. Everyone’s leveraged to the hilt. Whatever happened to good husbandry?”

Of course I didn’t sell. Bull markets are heady things.

Those were the days when risk had been re-priced by banks on the basis that it did not exist. Bankers were passing around toxic mortgage securities like Grandma’s cookies. They’ve since learned a $400-billion lesson that globalization doesn’t make risk vanish, whether in New York or London or Dublin.

Rough days lie ahead — since 1960 the average bear market has taken stocks down 31 percent — but out of the carnage may emerge a world where the old and new powers, as well as rich and poor, find some more reasonable balance, and American society some of its lost social coherence.

This city, after all, is one where a great poet wrote of “All changed, changed utterly.”