THE next time somebody asks you what’s hot in the stock market, whisper “Old Europe”.That will give your interrogator something different to think about. And it will pack the added punch of being true.

The pound breaks $2! The euro trades near record highs! Forecasters see faster growth in Euro-land than in the US this year!

Even US fund investors, notorious for their insularity, lately have noticed signs of extra zip in the old-line economies of Western Europe. Time, perhaps, to put aside those stereotypes of slow growth, heavy-handed regulation and “eurosclerosis” in which Europe’s economic image has so long been swathed.

Look at the New Germany Fund, a closed-end portfolio of some 50 small to medium-sized German stocks, which is riding high on the Top 10 list of US funds so far in 2007 with a gain of 22 percent.

For comparison, the German DAX Stock Index rose 10.4 percent year-to-date through the middle of this week, which translates to a 13.6 percent gain in US dollars. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of US stocks was up a mere 3.8 percent.

According to my Bloomberg, the New Germany Fund sports a return of 35 percent during the past year, 38 percent annually during the past three years, and 27 percent per annum over the past five.

“The global economy doesn’t revolve around the US any more,” said Edward Yardeni, chief investment strategist at the fund-management firm of Oak Associates Ltd. in Akron, Ohio. “This may be a bit of an exaggeration right now, but it is becoming increasingly true.”

“Most foreign economies are outpacing ours,” Yardeni wrote in a note to clients the other day. “I have been especially impressed by Germany. Industrial production over there is growing at rates normally associated with up-and-coming emerging countries, not mature industrial ones.”

This is happening, Yardeni points out, in spite of a recent increase in Germany’s value-added tax, as well as the drag of rising interest rates and currency gains that make European goods more expensive in world markets.

“The upswing will continue,” Axel Weber, president of the German Bundesbank, said this week. German growth has reached the point where it is providing a “significant expansive impulse to the euro area,” Weber said in a speech in Frankfurt.

This news has interesting implications beyond Germany, or the dozen other countries that use the euro as their common currency. To bullish investors anywhere, it suggests that global expansion might have broadened and deepened at an opportune time — just when US growth is slowing.

“Although risks remain, the global economy is having its strongest sustained expansion in more than 30 years and is becoming more balanced,” finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven industrialised nations said in a statement issued after they met in Washington last week.

More balanced, eh? That holds out hope for improvement in trade imbalances that have seen US consumers acting as the world’s non-stop shoppers for so long. Sure enough, the latest data show a turn for the better in the US trade deficit.

The gap between imports and exports shrank in February to $58.4 billion from $58.9 billion in January, the Commerce Department reported last week. Imports from China fell to a nine- month low.

Just imagine, says Jim Griffin, economic adviser to ING Investment Management Inc. in Hartford, Connecticut: “Global growth now propelled by something other than US momentum alone.”

The potential implications reach far and wide. Why, with economic strength in other countries working to offset whatever weakness occurs in the US this year, the Federal Reserve might prove much less inclined to cut interest rates than many people expect.

Stock markets, both in the US and around the world, might turn in surprisingly strong performances in appreciation of the persistent strength and resilience of the world-wide economic expansion.

This is tricky stuff, of course, jumping to all these big-picture conclusions from a few pieces of recent data. More evidence is surely needed.

But however things play out, recent events have served notice: No matter how big or small an operator you are, in the 21st century all investing is global investing.

(Chet Currier is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)