If you are biting your fingernails wondering where the American economy - and by extension, the global economy - is heading, stop biting. Nothing very dramatic is on the horizon, either to make all of us prosperous overnight, or to cast us into recessionary ruin, writes Robert Liebman.

Actually, we are in an economic phase characterised more by stability than volatility - and the scare headlines generated by the Bank of England's recent interest-rate rise actually proved this point in the end.

The real news was the surprise of it all, not the substance. And the surprise was not at the fact of the rate rise but at its timing - sooner than most people expected.

Corrections are far more likely than collapse, here and in the States as well, where the basic economy seems to be more than holding its own.

The Dow Jones industrial average recently hit a new high, and Nasdaq is also rising. The former speaks to a healthy economy generally, and the latter to a buoyant and important information-technology sector.