I have just arrived from a 16-day trip to California, visiting my two children Ivy and Ranel. Ivy Lopez, an Ateneo-trained lawyer, is married to her Ateneo law classmate Benedict Cabaltica who is also a CPA. Ranel is unmarried.

Bene and Ivy have three kids— Enzo, 11, Gio 6, and Audrey, 2. All three are very smart and intelligent, very disciplined in their food choices—no Coke or any soda, plenty of fish and vegetables; and very disciplined in their daily routine—sleep time by 7:30 p.m., wakeup at 7 a.m. for the two boys to take a bath, dress up, prepare their own breakfast, serve it to themselves, brush their teeth and off they walk to school which is a block away from their home in upscale Saratoga, a town (of 31,000) cheek-by-jowl to Cupertino, hometown of Steve Jobs, the world’s greatest CEO, according to Harvard Business Review.

In 17 years, from 1997 to 2011, according to HBR, under Steve Jobs, Apple increased market value by $359 billion, and gave shareholders a compounded annual return of 35 percent. “That remarkable achievement is likely to go unbeaten for a long time,” says HBR. Apple is now the world’s most valuable company.

From anecdotal evidence, the American economy is on the rebound. In the block where the Cabalticas live, four new houses are being erected. It takes only about six weeks to build a house from the ground up. Each house easily fetches $1 million, almost three times the average for the whole of California. There are many Indians in the neighborhood and they are employed in technology companies that dot Silicon Valley.

Bene, my son-in-law, has just joined the giant software company Oracle as a finance director, after a seven-year stint with KPMG where he also rose to the rank of director. It seems to me the US housing sector has bottomed out and is now on the upswing. During the 2008 financial collapse, up to ten million Americans saw the value of their homes cut by half.

I went to the Gilroy California outlet stores a day after New Year’s Day. People were lining up to shop at Coach, America’s luxury bags and accessories label. The only store where people queued to gawk at its products is Louis Vuitton at the Westfield Mall in San Jose, California. The Apple store in the same mall was packed with buyers and the curious. Fast selling were iPhone 5s, mini iPads, and desktop computers (which ran out of stock for several days). Across the Apple store is Microsoft. Its best seller is the Xbox 360 Kinect.

I was in California at the height of a major flu epidemic in America—the worst in ten years. I didn’t get sick fortunately.

Not sick is the US. It is on the verge of a boom. It has just sorted out its fiscal cliff problem (by postponing the solution). The US is the world’s biggest economy. The US GDP is $15 trillion, twice that of China in nominal terms, $7.3 trillion. In PPP (purchasing power parity) terms, China is closing in with a GDP (in PPP terms) of $11.37 trillion. The US economy will grow by two percent this year, almost the same as 2012’s.

China, on the other hand, with a GDP growth of 8.2 percent, will add more than a $1 trillion in wealth to the world economy. The Economist uses $1.3 trillion —more than twice the US contribution, three times India’s, and nearly ten times Brazil’s. America’s best selling technology consumer products are made in China—Apple products, the Microsoft Xbox, headphones used for gaming, electronics. Many luxury brands from France, Italy, Switzerland and the US are made in China.

So why do we quarrel with China?

Anyway, the vitality of the US and China economies is proof that 2013 is going for a good one for Asia in general and for the Philippines in particular. “Cyclical upswings are now under way in every region of the world apart from Europe. In China and the rest of Asia, growth is rebounding strongly after a lull caused by soaring oil prices in the summer of 2011 and the fears of a European financial meltdown in the first half of 2012,” says Anatole Kaletsky, a journalist and an economist writing for The Economist. “Global growth can accelerate, even if China merely stabilizes while advanced economies continue to suffer from debt overhangs,” he adds.

The Philippines is likely to grow by 6 percent this 2013, continuing the frenetic growth pace of 2012 when GDP rose by 7.1 percent in the third quarter.

Disturbing though is the surge in unemployment. It seems the Aquino government is trying to massage unemployment figures by declaring a very low labor force participation rate of 63.9 percent (the ratio of population 15 years and above to the total population), lower by three percentage points, from 66.3 in 2011, so that unemployment officially is 6.8 percent, instead of 10 percent.

“If the participation rate were held at the same rate (which would not be an unreasonable assumption as this statistics tends to be relatively stable), then the real unemployment rate should be 10.18 percent which should demand a course correction,” emailed Joey Salceda, PNoy’s classmate at their Ateneo economics class. Despite the 7.1 percent GDP growth in Q32012, “the labor survey showed a jobs loss of 882,000 which pushed unemployment rate to 6.91 percent from 2011’s 6.4 percent.”

Indeed, a 10.18 percent unemployment rate—a record—cannot be explained in a booming economy, unless you admit the boom is false. That demands an explanation.

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