Forget all the talking heads on TV, one of the best forecasters of the global economy is Cisco CEO John Chambers. He sees a steady, albeit mediocre pickup in US growth with Europe stabilizing.

Here is what he had to say in yesterday’s earnings call:

I think the U.S. is sustainable, especially in commercial and enterprise with all the appropriate caveats. My few years at law school taught me on that. But I watch the pipeline, I watch the approach. Our U.S. Enterprise and Commercial are usually a very good indicator of GDP slowly increasing or GDP decreasing, and we saw a turn up in U.S. in Enterprise and Commercial back in summer of 2012, and if you bought [indiscernible], Ben, I think we all understand what would have happened. So, that feels good and you combine that with the CEOs I talked to, most of us feel 2.5%, 3% for the next nine months is very doable number. Not many things to do backflips on, but reasonable progress.

Europe is still a little bit fragile, but we did see stability across the north with some growth rates for a change and Europe in total was finally positive, not counting the emerging markets for us, and even stability in the South, looks like its occurring. Now I know they’ve still got structural issues there, and I know some of the countries are in transformation, have some tough decisions to make. But I think they are out of this downturn, slowly improving. And when I talked with our customers and the top financial people in New York which I did just a week ago, almost everybody else is beginning to see very similar trends. In fact, it almost was scary because when you describe the world just like I did earlier, including emerging markets and the challenges in Russia and Brazil, we could finish each other’s sentences regardless of industry.

So I think Europe is coming back. Again, it’s going to be slow and heavy lifting there, but they haven’t addressed some of those structural issues, but more consistency; and even the South is starting to show stability on it in terms of direction. So, good about the U.S., good about Europe, don’t feel very good about emerging markets. They are still very challenged, especially the BRICs.

Also:

There are three areas of our business which we have discussed for the last several quarters where we are managing through challenges, both macro and Cisco-specific. First, emerging markets; from a macroeconomic perspective, continue to be challenging. Orders in our emerging markets declined 7% with the BRICs plus Mexico down 13%.

As we said for several quarters, we expect these challenges to continue. The challenges we saw in Brazil down 27% and Russia down 28% are consistent with those we are hearing and seeing from our peers and customers, while China declined 8%, Mexico declined 3% and India declined 1%.