The G-8 summit starts today in L’Aquila, Italy. The G-8 are the old guard: US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia. And their opinions are starting to look a little redundant in the aftermath of the credit crisis.

The credit crisis has shifted the balance of power. Not since the days of the conquistadors has there been such an imbalance. Back then the Pope was the ultimate power and carved the New World in two between Spain and Portugal. Now it’s the split between old and new economies.

The levels of debt raised by the developed nations to bail out their banking systems is crippling compared to the emerging nations.  According to recent International Monetary Fund forecasts by 2014 the debt of economies in the developed world are expected to be more than 114% of GDP (up from 78% in 2006).  The forecasts for the emerging economies (including China) is just 35% (down from 38% in 2006).

With most of the developed nations in the worst economic condition since the second world war, the balance of power is clearly shifting in favor of the large emerging nations. China and India in particular.

Added to their new found lack of financial flexibility, the G-8 nations have another major problem: a lack of harmony in their thinking. Germany and Canada have been calling for a steady wind down of the emergency liquidity measures while the UK and US continue to favor pumping cash into the economies.

On the other hand the leaders of 5 major developing Economies (China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa) are holding their own parallel meeting. This follows on from the first ever BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) summit held last month in Russia. The developing powers are quickly putting in place their own structures and the old world is in danger of being left out of the new world order. The closer these developing powers become politically the less likely the dollar is to remain as the world’s reserve currency. Remember the BRIC nations currently hold some US$1.1 trillion of US government debt. At the BRIC summit Russia was calling for a move away from the US dollar.  It feels more and more like a whenrather than an if situation.

As investors, we are often faced with difficult decisions, especially those which involve putting cold hard facts ahead of personal feelings. We are entering such a phase now. We need to put aside our personal nationalism in the face of an obvious global power shift. Jim Rogers said in an interview last year that the best investment you could give your kids today is to buy them Chinese lessons. We agree.

As far as our financial portfolios are concerned we need to make sure we are having our piece of the emerging pie. There are unique risks to investing in the emerging world (e.g. political instability, weak legal systems etc) and you really have to do your homework. I would recommend keeping your exposure to less than 10% of your total portfolio. Also stick to highly liquid assets, like stocks and bonds. You don’t want to wake up finding that you never really owned that real estate you bought in China and it has been bulldozed to build a sports stadium, now do you?