As risks to the global economy rises, the brisk economy of USA faces an uncertain future, with the crisis now starting to affect bigger nations like Japan's four trillion dollar economy, the Washington Post said.

"Of course, the risk is increasing. In Japan, the stock market crashes, competitive currency depreciation spreads from Asia to round the world and there is suspension of debt payments by every emerging market economy," Rudiger Dornbusch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said.

Though China is presently well placed as far as foreign exchange reserves are concerned with 140 billion dollars, the crisis in East Asia may worsen if it is forced to devalue, and it would indirectly affect the US, the Post added.

William Dudley, an economist atGoldman Sachs, a leading investment bank, said the prospect of a global recession can no longer be dismissed as lightly as it could have been just a few weeks ago.

Until recently, the crisis that started in Thailand last summer and spread to Indonesia and South Korea were striking countries with relatively smaller economies. "But Japan has a four trillion dollar economy. The Korean economy before the crisis, was about 485 billion dollars. So if there was to be a second round of crisis, it would be very likely for it to spread to Latin America and have a bigger effect on the US," Dudley added.

A slowdown in global growth is also in the offing with East-asian countries likely to register negative growth rates in the range of five to 20 per cent and Japan's economy sliding into a recession, William Cline, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, an organisation of banks and security firms said.