It’s official – unemployment in the rich world is growing at the fastest rate since the post-war period, according to the Paris based OECD, which represents the world’s advanced economies. New numbers out this week show that if things don’t improve, one out of ten workers in rich countries are going to be out of a job by 2010, a situation that OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria calls a “full blown social crisis.”

The OECD forecasts are bleaker than many others – they think economic growth in the U.S. is going to be minus four percent next year, but that’s nothing compared to Japan, where GDP is predicted to contract by 6.6 percent – I mean, does anyone even remember the last time a rich country shrank by over 6 percent? This is serious stuff...

Perhaps Japanese firms should take a cue from IBM, which has started a program called “Project Match” to hook downsized white collar workers in the U.S. and Canada up with new jobs in places like Argentina, Nigeria, Russia, and China. “IBM has established Project Match to help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where you skills are in demand,” reads the chirpy internal memo that was recently obtained by my colleague and co-blogger Barrett Sheridan. Project Matchers should be “open to new experiences and new cultures” and “excited at the prospect of contributing to a developing economy.” So far, only dozens of employees find this prospect more exciting than collecting an unemployment check in some commuter town. But if things get any worse, I predict this could be a whole new type of offshoring…

Jon Stewart hit this sentiment on the head when he took on the belief that "the stock market is the only rational, objective indicator of a commander-in-chief's performance." With delicious delivery, he rhetorically mocked the naive assumptions of the non-Wall Streeters:

I know you what you people, you six-pack-sipping, iceberg-lettuce-eating, America-loving non-elitists, sitting down in your ivory basements, are thinking: "Isn’t the Dow Jones Industrial Average just a short-twitch numerical representation of a bunch of guesses about other people’s assumptions about the financial well-being of an arbitrarily chosen group of 30, out of tens of thousands of possible companies?" No! you’re wrong!

It was a brilliant bit of populist comedy, but unfortunately it's not quite accurate. The stock market is more than just a playground for hedge funds; it has real effects on the real economy, and not just because "paper losses" in the markets make us feel poorer and spend less.

It took Alan Greenspan to remind me of that. Writing in the Financial Times yesterday, he says that stocks have "purchasing power": "Most automotive dealers, for example, being compensated for the inconvenience, would presumably accept shares of stock as payment for a car." (This example feels a little forced -- "presumably"? -- but he's generally correct.) More importantly, a company's stock price is its collateral; the higher its stock price, the more it can borrow and spend. In Greenspan's (convoluted and jargony) words:

Stock prices have a statistically highly significant impact on private capital investment...Analyses suggest that much of the recent decline in global economic activity can be associated directly or indirectly with declining equity values.

Of course, at this point Greenspan makes a giant leap of faith -- if only Wall Street can pull itself out of its stupor and initiate a bull market, all our problems will be solved! In his words:

I very much suspect that the force that will be seen to have been most instrumental to global economic recovery will be a partial reversal of the $35,000 billion global loss in corporate equity values that has so devastated financial intermediation.

In other words, free markets can yet save the day! While I find it hard to go along with such market boosterism (do policymakers have no role in breaking the cycle of fear now gripping markets?), Greenspan's elucidation of the role of stocks in a modern economy is a useful antidote to the occasional fit of populism.

This blog has only been live for two days and already we're getting excellent comments from our readers. We want Wealth of Nations to be a conversation, and when you say something smart, we plan to highlight it.

I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction to my post on the end of Swiss banking secrecy. I wasn't sure international banking regulations and cross-border information-sharing would interest many readers, but apparently secret offshore accounts stir the imagination.

Several readers noted that Hollywood's fascination with Swiss banks might stem from more than just their usefulness as plot devices. "Never mind making a movie about the Swiss bank," writes sgm17. "It looks like the very Hollywood elite won't be able to hide their assets anymore, let's hope." 

John_Toradze took exception with my characterization of the bank's customers as a "moneyed elite." "Not everybody with Swiss accounts is dodging taxes or a millionaire," he comments. "The main reason lots of people opened such accounts was to be able to hold the account in euros in order to balance currency exposure...Most people with Swiss accounts were pretty middle class, and a few had huge amounts of money in them."

John is absolutely right, but I don't think middle-class customers have anything to fear from the end of Swiss banking secrecy -- so long as they were paying taxes appropriately in their home country. For that matter, millionaires and billionaires with Swiss bank accounts shouldn't have a knee-jerk reaction against this move, unless they were using those accounts to evade taxes or hide diamonds. 

Of course, some have a philosophical objection to sharing information with the government in the first place. "I don't believe the government should have the right to make me fill out a form every year declaring exactly how much I made, where it came from and where it went," writes NHanson. I can sympathize with that sentiment, but unless libertarians are able to change current tax laws, we're left with a system where we give up a certain degree of privacy -- and lucre -- in exchange for public services, including national defense, emergency response, and yes, financial-industry bailouts. Not doing so is illegal.

But NHanson has a second concern, namely that persecuted minorities or people living in countries with weak rule of law might have a legitimate -- and ethically defensible -- reason to hide money from their government. NHanson uses the example of Jews living in Nazi Germany, whose assets were plundered by the state. In 1972, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelled his country's 70,000-strong Indian minority -- certainly they would have been smart to hide some cash abroad. In more modern times, you might have reason to fear for your bank accounts if you were a well-to-do political activist in Russia. 

As far as I can tell, the new Swiss willingness to share more information will be indulged on a case-by-case basis, only where reasonable suspicion of illicit activity exists. I hope they will refuse to cooperate with politically-motivated or racist persecutions. Furthermore, sharing tax information is not the same as sharing funds. Presumably, should one of today's Idi Amins demand that the Swiss turn over the assets of one of today's persecuted minorities, I imagine the Swiss would politely demur. In fact, they can leave out the "politely" part if they wish.  

Can you think of any other ethically defensible reasons for impenetrable banking secrecy laws? If so, leave 'em in the comments!

China's proposing wacky currency schemes. Brazil's playing cheap racial politics cards. Gordon Brown's going on a whirlwind global tour, while getting smacked around by both his hosts and his own country's rep in the European parliament. Saudi Arabia's holding out on IMF funding because its leaders feel they haven't been properly thanked for stabilizing oil prices. And Argentina's bringing up the Falkla--I mean, the Malvinas. Again. Even though everyone else has made it rather plain that they couldn't care less.

With everyone looking to get their cut at this week's G20 summit, it's useful to step back and take a tally of the demands each country brings to the table--which is why I think this interactive wishlist from the FT is so nifty. It's been pretty simple to track the big themes of the past few weeks' pre-summit politicking: developed countries are treading mighty carefully, while rising economies are looking for any opportunity to speed up their transition from rising to risen. But play with the priorities tool on this graphic; there's also some overlap and fissure in unexpected places.

Exhibit A: What do South Korea, Turkey, Japan, India, Canada, and Brazil all have in common that none of the other participants share? All are campaigning hard against protectionist measures. And which is the one developing country joining the US, UK, and France in their crusade against tax havens? Argentina, randomly enough. Who knew? Maybe the Malvinas have a chance after all. If Cristina Kirchner can cozy up to Gordon Brown during the tax haven debate, perhaps she can slip him a note under the table.

Newsweek's daily serving of news and views from around the world.

The Odd Couple at the Helm: He's vain. She's no-nonsense. He's hyperactive. She's measured. He likes government. She likes markets. But although they're producing very different national responses, Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy are cobbling together a marriage of circumstance for the euro zone to resist American calls for more spending.

China Steps Up to the IMF Plate: The IMF has never been a favored organization in the People's Republic, but Chinese leaders are willing to hand over funding in exchange for a bigger share in decision-making. Securing those funds could be the big achievement of the G20. But the EU commissioner for external affairs, representing countries that would lose influence, is telling Beijing that this week is not the right time to discuss the matter.

Time for a Plan B, America: Peterson Institute economist Adam Posen takes to the Daily Beast today, likening America's predicament to his experience working with Japan in the 1990s. Joining Jeff Sachs, Paul Krugman, and Simon Johnson, he argues the Geithner plan amounts to bribing private investors with taxpayer money. He also targets the Europeans in an interview with Der Spiegel, saying he favors the American stimulus approach--just not the Geithner version.

China's 'War of Nerves' Strains Asia's Nerves: The Chinese are getting mixed responses in attempts to shore up local support for its stance at the G20. China and Indonesia just signed a $14.6 billion currency swap agreement eliminating the need to use the dollar as an intermediary, but others with big reserve holdings like Japan, South Korea, and India are more skeptical.

France Wades Into African Quagmires: Nicolas Sarkozy wrapped up two uranium-mining deals in his trip to Niger, Congo, and the DRC, important for France's nuclear energy projects. The mines have stirred controversy in the past in countries prone to political turmoil and outbreaks of violence.

If you parse all the testimony and the punditry we’ve heard in recent weeks, a common theme emerges: There is a deep philosophical divide between those who want to fix the financial house we have, and those who think we should knock down the old house and build a brand-new one—a new Wall Street, in other words. On one side: Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, as well as Obama-appointed regulators like Mary Schapiro of the SEC. They want serious fixes to the system—new rules to repair the old house and ensure that it is safe in the future--but they also seek to keep the old house intact. On the other side: critics such as Paul Krugman and possibly even Paul Volcker and Sheila Bair, chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, who think the old house is structurally unsound. They believe that not only can’t we solve the present crisis by merely tinkering with the old house, but we’ll assuredly find ourselves in another crisis down the line if we don’t dismantle it entirely. It’s a debate that encompasses all the back-and-forth over Geithner’s and Bernanke’s careful, intricate plan to fix the big Wall Street banks—as opposed to nationalizing and dismantling them—as well as the new, cautious regulatory scheme that the Treasury secretary laid out last week, which will be hashed over in Congress and at the G20 later this week.

I’m not sure where I come down yet, but we ought to understand, at least, the terms of the discussion. At the heart of the issue is the “too-big-to-fail” problem. What got us into this trouble wasn’t just a lack of regulation and oversight of mortgage securitization or derivatives trading. It was that Wall Street institutions were permitted to grow into global monsters that did as they pleased and then, when they failed, were too gargantuan to be permitted to disappear from the scene, which is supposed to be what happens in capitalism. Geithner and Bernanke are both acutely concerned about this problem, but neither has gone as far as, say, former Fed Chairman Volcker in calling for new rules that would prevent systemically dangerous monstrosities like Citigroup and AIG from rising again. Volcker, whom Preisident Obama named to head his Economic Recovery Board but whose influence in Washington has been hard to detect, recently proposed a “two-tier” financial system somewhat in the spirit of Glass-Steagall. He didn’t suggest that commercial banks and investment banks be separated into two worlds again, but he did propose that underwriting (as of mortgage-backed securities) be separated by law from “very heavy proprietary trading.”

The regulatory framework that Geithner laid out last week before Congress and will pitch to a skeptical G20, while impressive in its scope, does not do this. He wants a lot of useful things: higher capital requirements for bigger firms (effectively a tax on bigness); a powerful systemic risk regulator; and new oversight authorities over mutual funds and hedge funds. What he didn’t ask for is structural changes to the firms that will be subject to all this new regulation, a la Volcker. Neither has Bernanke. The bet is that these new rules, and an overarching systemic risk regulator, can keep that old Wall Street monster house from raging out of control again. But I wonder.  Geithner did not even propose a serious reining in of the wild-west “over-the-counter” trading that occurs off exchanges world-wide. Instead he offered up a rather mild alternative: OTC trading for derivative contracts will have to go through a central clearinghouse that presumably will be industry-run. Geithner added, almost as an afterthought: “We will also encourage greater use of exchange-traded instruments.”

This leave-the-house-intact approach to the future is of a philosophical piece with the approach that Geithner and Bernanke have taken to the immediate crisis. Both men believe that the financial sector as presently constituted—Wall Street, in other words-- is too large and complex to be taken over and re-created by the federal government. Geithner, in an interview with me last week, approvingly cited a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by William Isaac, the former head of the FDIC. Isaac argues like the Treasury secretary that taking over the worst big banks—nationalizing them—is just too gargantuan and risky a task. “Unlike the talking heads, I have actually nationalized a large bank,” Isaac wrote. This was the Continental Illinois Bank, the nation’s seventh-largest, which fell into trouble during the banking crisis of the 1980s. The 1984 nationalization—or takeover--worked. But it took seven years for the government to sell it off, and that was in an up-market. Why wouldn’t work today? Isaac asks. “Let's begin with the fact that today our 10 largest banking companies hold some two-thirds of the nation's banking assets, and some are enormously complex. Continental had less than 2 percent of the nation's banking assets,” he writes. Further, “who will run these companies when we dismiss the existing senior managers and board members? We had significant difficulties attracting quality people to Continental even without today's limits on compensation. …What's more, we won't be able to stop at nationalizing one or two banks. If we start down that path, the short sellers and other speculators … will target for destruction one after another of our largest banks.” Finally, the FDIC’s plan for Continental Illinois required it to shrink to half its size within three years. To do that now to Wall Street, in the middle of a severe recession “where deflation is a realistic concern,” runs against the government’s expansionary policy.

These are all good points. And Tim Geithner is a deliberate, highly capable fellow. But Geithner is rolling the dice -- betting the house, as it were-- in the greatest gamble of his life right now. He wants us to emerge from the current catastrophe and remain safe from future catastrophe while working from largely the same financial house. He has a point too. The government is already strained to the limit of its financial resources and political will – Congress would fight the kind of money needed for nationalization – in what it can do to remake Wall Street. And let’s remember that, until it collapsed of its own size and hubris, Wall Street was a great engine of growth for the U.S. and global economy. So I do hope Geithner is right. But I also fear that he may be wrong, and that even if all these new capital infusions and regulatory restraints are imposed, the old house as it stands may not be fixable. And it will, inevitably, get out of hand once again.

We posted a couple times last week on the kerfuffle surrounding remarks by China's central bank governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, that advocated "creat[ing] an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations." To many, this sounded like an attempt to displace the dollar from the top of the currency heap, and a sign of China's growing ambitions.

Brad Setser, a macroeconomist at the Council on Foreign Relations, who I quoted in my earlier post, took the weekend to read Zhou's comments more closely and came up with a different interpretation: "In some ways Zhou’s call is a sign of weakness as much as a sign of strength," he wrote on his blog yesterday.

Zhou stopped short of calling for a new global currency like a Bancor. What he actually advocated is a larger role for some arcane device called "special drawing rights." SDRs were created by the International Monetary Fund in 1969 because the Fund didn't want its loans to be denominated in a single national currency. After all, if I'm Thailand circa 1997, and I have to take an emergency loan from the IMF, I don't necessarily want to pay it back all in dollars. What if the dollar-baht exchange rate fluctuates too much? The value of my debt would be constantly changing. SDRs, instead, are based on a basket of four currencies -- the dollar, the pound, the yen, and the euro. If the value of one of those currencies changes dramatically it will impact the value of a loan made out in SDRs, but much less so than if the loan were just made out in dollars.

But as the IMF itself likes to point out, "the SDR is neither a currency, nor a claim on the IMF." You can't pay for a shipment of oil with SDRs, and there's no such thing as an SDR coin or an SDR bill with a picture of Kofi Annan on it. Rather, holding an SDR gives you the right to a certain amount of dollars, yen, pounds, and euros. So even if everything in the world were denominated in SDRs -- and if it were possible to assign negative probabilities to an event, I would assign one here -- there would still be plenty of need for dollar reserves. Last week's talk of a "supranational reserve currency" misunderstood the immediate and practical implications of Zhou's white paper.

So where does Chinese weakness come in? As I noted last week, China holds about $1 trillion in Treasury bills, which represents about 25 percent of Chinese GDP. If the dollar declines, so too does the value of that hoard. As Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institue puts it, the "threat of dollar decline has suddenly become more immediate because of the dramatically increased vulnerability of the US government's balance sheet." China would love to be able to hand over some of those Treasury bills to the IMF in exchange for SDRs, which aren't as exposed to the dollar.

Perhaps it's useful to paraphrase an old saying here: "If you owe China a billion dollars, China owns you. If you owe China a trillion dollars, you own China."

Give the Chinese free health care. Goldman Sachs’ chief economist Jim O’Neill told me that he thinks the Chinese government’s recent announcement that it plans to offer basic state health care to 90 percent of its population by 2011 is the “most important policy decision in the world at the moment.” That’s saying something given the slew of executive decisions being taken every other day in the U.S, Europe and elsewhere to avert recession. The idea, aside from providing better health care, is to get the Chinese to start spending. Because they have no free medical care or social safety net, they stash away 20 percent of their income to prepare for things like medical emergencies (in China, if you have an operation, you have to put down cash in advance). Nationalize health care, and the need to save so much goes away – a kind of mega-stimulus when you consider the potential consumer power of 1.3 billion people.

Whether or not Beijing manages to make it all happen, the effects of health care and health costs on the economy are becoming a bigger issue everywhere. In Europe, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a new formula for calculating economic growth (to be unveiled in a report later this spring) that would take into account the longer term benefits of state run education, health care and unemployment insurance. As many economists point out, the fact that consumer spending hasn’t fallen off a cliff in Europe as fast as it has in America is in part down to the stronger social safety-net.

Of course, while it’s statistically tricky to try and account for the intangible (if important) benefits of such things, it’s clear that the current system of calculating GDP has got some major flaws. For example, one of the many reasons that American economic growth is historically higher than European growth is because we spend so much more on health care – yet we are sicker and die younger than the average European, proof that at least some of that investment is money wasted. Our GDP numbers also look better because we have so many more people in jail than other nations, and thus spend vastly more on prisons. But that’s another story…

President Obama, announcing another dip into the federal coffers today to save the auto industry, blamed a “failure of leadership”—perhaps a potshot at the soon-to-be departed GM chairman, Rick Wagoner. The workers were not at all fault, the president said. “I will fight for you,” he declared. I’m sure that line was popular back in the factories, but in his eagerness to stay ahead of the populist curve Obama seems to have ignored entirely the role of the unions. Like the fact that for decades the UAW has resisted the kinds of changes that would have made the U.S. auto industry marginally competitive with the foreign companies that have been beating it up since the ‘70s. One example: the "Jobs Bank," a two-decade-old program under which auto workers continue to get paid wages and benefits often topping $100,000 a year after their companies stop needing them. The Treasury Department has demanded that the UAW cut compensation to levels competitive with Nissan, Toyota and Honda. But it’s not happening. The Big Three still pay about $55 an hour in wages and benefits to hourly workers, while Japanese automakers pay nearly $10 less an hour, according to Barclays Capital. I don’t feel sorry at all for Rick Wagoner, but let’s spread the blame fairly. Cheap populism on such a critical issue is a losing proposition.

Newsweek's daily serving of news and views around the world.

Nice Knowing You: The Obama Administration has forced the ouster of Rick Wagoner, chairman and CEO of General Motors. The ailing automakers had already run through $17.4 billion in federal aid, and GM said it needed $16.6 billion more to survive. Chrysler is liable to win another $6 billion in government money if the company can finalize a proposed alliance with Italian automaker Fiat within 30 days. Stock markets worldwide tumbled under fears that Detroit might go bust.

Help Me Help You: President Obama grants an interview to the Financial Times, in which he spotlights one side effect of the crisis: "Now [reading the FT is] trendy and everybody carries around a Financial Times." More substantively, he urges bankers to show self-restraint in crafting compensation packages -- "That will put me in a stronger position to help them" -- and denies the onset of a new era of protectionism, despite the "Buy American" clause. "I think in a democracy there are always going to be some loose ends out there [but] I think we are going to be able to hold the line on any significant slippage."

Dubai Battles Corruption, In Its Own Way: The indebted emirate is trying to clean house, and authorities are cracking down on the shady executives of the boom years. But some suspects have been held for months without charged, and some allege they've been victims of torture. The government, furiously trying to keep the collapsing bubble intact, may pass a law banning any negative press that "could harm the national economy."

America the Tarnished: Paul Krugman, target of this week's cover profile, says what we all already know, but says it in such an engaging way that we just have to link to it: "These days America is looking like the Bernie Madoff of economies: for many years it was held in respect, even awe, but it turns out to have been a fraud all along."

A Second Opinion on the World Economy: A top executive at General Electric says that the world economy is starting to show signs of a turnaround. "The first glimmers of hope are there," says Nani Beccalli, chief executive of GE International. "This is the inversion of trends, which for a long period have been going down. The glimmers weren’t there two months ago." In particular, Beccalli looks favorably on the recent rise of a shipping index, which many view as a proxy for global trade. 

One Nation, One Vote: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wants an extra $500 billion for the International Monetary Fund, and reform of the international institution is on the agenda at this week's G20 summit. But China and other developing nations want a bigger say in the Fund's management -- which has traditionally been dominated by the U.S. and Europe -- if they're going to chip in.

Pity Hollywood. The credit crunch has killed -- or at least maimed -- one of the favored tropes of spy movies and action thrillers: the secretive Swiss bank. Celluloid terrorists and criminals (and probably a few real ones, too) used them to stash their ill-gotten gains, and uber-assassin Jason Bourne found secrets to his true identity (and a gun and wads of cash) in an Alpine vault.

By and large, the Swiss bank as Hollywood knew it no longer exists. U.S. officials have long wanted to make a dent in the European nation's famed banking secrecy laws; they saw it as a refuge for tax evaders and terrorist financiers. In June, they secured a guilty plea from Bradley Birkenfeld, a former banker for Zurich-based UBS who admitted to helping a wealthy California businessman hide assets from the IRS. The always-helpful Birkenfeld even smuggled diamonds in a tube of toothpaste on a flight into the U.S. for his client. Then, in February, UBS agreed to hand over to U.S. authorities the names of 300 clients -- it was the first breach of Swiss secrecy laws since 1934, according to Bloomberg. In March, Switzerland and other offshore banking havens (including Luxembourg and Austria) caved more formally, with government officials agreeing to share tax information with the U.S. and other countries.

The whole saga has made big news in Europe, but barely been noticed in the U.S., which is too bad -- and not just because of its impact on Hollywood. In some ways it's a mini-parable of the financial crisis: Switzerland's private banks grew rich thanks to lax government interference and dodgy, sometimes illegal activities. Now governments around the world are calling for greater transparency and more oversight (sound familiar?), in part to shore up their crumbling tax bases, which have been hard-hit by the recession. And the bankers themselves have been prosecuted (see: Birkenfeld) and vilified -- last week the Financial Times reported that many are afraid to travel internationally, for fear of being apprehended.   

I don't see too many negatives here; few will cry over the loss of a tax haven for the moneyed elite. And Hollywood may have lost a favored plot device, but never fear -- it can always make a movie about the end of offshore banking. A well-dressed executive huddled over a bathroom sink, stuffing diamonds into a tube of Colgate -- that'd make a great visual.  

As we all know by now, the only companies making serious money these days are those that sell stuff that is cheap – Wal-Mart and McDonald's were the lone stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average that ended 2008 with a gain.

What’s not as well known is how fast a group of new emerging market giants is coming on thanks to the recession. Newsweek wrote about some of these New Blue Chips back when the markets were still flush, and things have only gotten better for them since. Their success often comes down to thrift—the top 100 companies in emerging markets are much less indebted than their Western peers, and almost always offer better retail prices. Chinese telecom and mobile phone firm Huawei has been undercutting Western rivals like Cisco and Ericsson for years, and now pulls in about 70 percent of its money from foreign markets. Ditto its compatriot firm, ZTE, which is on the verge of buying Motorola. Then of course there’s Tata, the amazing Indian conglomerate that’s revolutionizing the auto industry with its $2000 Nano compact car. Following closely behind are the Chinese auto firms Chery and Geely, both of which are interested in buying Volvo from Ford (by the way, earlier this year, China became the number one auto market in the world by unit sales, surpassing the U.S. -- wake up and smell the fumes!).

Given all this, it's perhaps no surprise that a number of investment banks in New York trying to sell off bad assets in sad sectors like the automotive industry are currently preparing their prospectuses only in Mandarin or Hindi. I mean, why bother with English when the Chinese and Indians are the only ones buying? It’s only a matter of time before the bankers themselves are sitting in Shanghai and Mumbai, too. Post financial crisis, China’s state run ICBC is now the largest bank in the world.

When I was in China last December, I interviewed ICBC chairman Jiang Jianqing, and reminded him that he had once been quoted as saying that he hoped ICBC would become the Citigroup of China. “I’m not sure I used exactly those words,” he told me, laughing and hedging. Jiang did say that he thought Tim Geithner was a “wise man” (though I’m curious what he would say now three months and several major screw ups on) and that despite the implosion on Wall Street, he still admired Americans because of their “endless passion for innovation.” Jiang, just let us know where we can send our resumes.

It’s amazing Tim Geithner has time to read anything at all beyond drafts of his latest plan to save the financial system. But in an interview last week with my colleague Jeff Bartholet and me, the Treasury secretary revealed that he was deep into “Lords of Finance,” Liaquat Ahamed’s brilliant history of the hapless central bankers of the Depression era who “broke the world,” mainly by adhering blindly to the gold standard (read my full report on the interview here). I finished the book myself not too long ago, and it’s a great read. The hero of “Lords of Finance” is John Maynard Keynes, who fought valiantly against the tragically dated conventional economic wisdom of his day. “More than anything, the Great Depression was caused by a failure of intellectual will, a lack of understanding of how the economy operated,” writes Ahamed, an investment manager who has worked both at the World Bank and on Wall Street. Ahamed, of course, draws a parallel to the present crisis (though it has grown considerably worse since the book came out) and concludes chillingly: “In some respects the current crisis is even more virulent than the banking panics of 1931-33. In the 1930s most depositors had to line up physically outside their bank to get their money. Now massive amounts of money are being siphoned off with the click of a mouse. Moreover, the world’s financial system has become both larger compared to GDP and more complex and interconnected. There is much greater leverage, and many more banks rely on short-term wholesale sources of funding that can evaporate overnight. The world’s banks are therefore much more vulnerable than they were then. As a result panic has swept through the system faster and more destructively.”

It ain’t over yet, folks—both the banking crisis itself and the debate over what should be done about it. Barack Obama and the nation’s major bankers made nice at a White House meeting on Friday, with everyone agreeing that 'we're all in this together,'' as Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs put it. The bank chiefs are happy that Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke have emphatically rejected nationalization of the worst-hit banks, saying that critics like Paul Krugman who embrace the scorched-earth approach don’t understand how difficult this would be (think AIG). Geithner and Bernanke (whom I've profiled here and here, respectively) would prefer to stand pat and leave the banks intact; they hope that what’s left of TARP, along with the public-private partnership funds designed to buy up toxic assets and the TALF securitization plan, will be enough to nurse most of them back to health. But Geithner and Bernanke have also hinted that the government may have to effectively take over at least a couple of major banks anyway after the ”stress tests” are completed in April. And with the TARP funds running down—Geithner is cagey about how much exactly is left-- that’s going to mean another call on a recalcitrant Congress for a lot more money. “I think the taxpayers are going to pay trillions,” says Harvard economist Ken Rogoff.

It’s not clear that Geithner and Bernanke -- who have been working so closely recently they might as well be called the Tim-and-Ben show -- see eye to eye themselves on this issue. Geithner has insisted that all the government might do is to make a substantial investment in the troubled banks, while Bernanke’s language has hinted at taking some control of them. A senior economic official in Washington told me in recent days that, when they move, the Treasury and Fed are still going to have many of the tools of ownership and supervision that come with nationalization, even though they won’t force the banks into bankruptcy or “haircut” the banks’ creditors. “I think they’ll do something in three to six months,” says Rogoff. Or sooner: Stocks stocks tumbled around the world again today, in part because of the news that GM and Chrysler may not make it--but also in response to reports that Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have indicated conditions had worsened for them.

How can China keep growing in the midst of a global recession that's taking everyone else down? The conventional wisdom is that it can't -- even China bulls like Morgan Stanley's Ruchir Sharma have said so in Newsweek. But in recent weeks, Chinese businesses and consumers have started spending again, even as Americans zip up their wallets. This is counter-intuitive, because another economic truism is that Chinese growth depends on selling tons of cheap stuff to Americans (about 80 percent of what's on the shelves at Wal-Mart comes from China).

Andy Rothman, a very smart Shanghai based economist with CLSA, recently gave me his rather radical explanation for China's continued success. He believes China is NOT an export-driven economy. In economic circles, this is like saying the Pope isn't Catholic. But he's got a compelling argument -- Rothman says that about half of the products stamped "Made In China" are merely assembled there, meaning that the Chinese don't see (or miss) much value from them. 

One example would be the 30GB video iPod which went on sale in 2005, with a US retail price of $299. The factory value is $150, but only 5 percent of that -- $7.50 -- was actually created in China. The rest was left in other Asian countries that actually manufactured the complex parts that got snapped together in some factory in the Pearl River Delta.

What this means is that while it might look like the Chinese are losing $150 bucks everytime a recently laid off American decides not to walk into the Apple store and buy an iPod, they are actually only missing a fraction of that. Meanwhile, the Chinese government pockets get deeper and deeper -- bank lending was up 1000 percent in December from the same time the previous year. Those Confucian values of thrift and prudence really seem to pay off in a global recession....

Say whaaaat?! Yes, a certain glitzy street in lower Manhattan has a whole lot of explaining to do for itself these days. And, absolutely, the world's poor are bearing a disproportionate burden of the hardships, what with evictions on the rise and aid and investment clamming up. What's more, we get that Brazil and its fellow BRIC pals have a lot to gain from making extra noise at this G20 summit--Lula himself told us as much in an interview with Fareed Zakaria last week.

But for the record, we humbly beg to differ with his characterization of the guilty parties. For evidence, we offer the handiwork of the indefatigable Kathy Jones, who put together a photo gallery of the banks' biggest bad guys. For starters, Stan O'Neal sure ain't white. And Angelo Mozilo is unmistakably orange.

You probably thought the Jim Cramer vs. Jon Stewart feud was over. And it is, for the most part. But I just stumbled on this video from PBS. It's a clip from an episode of the investigative journalism series Frontline from way back in 1997, and the first couple minutes show Jim Cramer in action as a hedge fund manager. He's just as frenetic and ridiculous-looking as he is now, except he's shouting derivatives orders at traders instead of bopping oversized sound effects buttons. (He's also a lot heavier -- clearly the markets are more stressful than television.)

It's mostly just a curious aside to the larger financial story, but it does remind us that the roots of the current crisis run deep. Cramer and people like him have been hyping stocks since at least the 1990s -- as Frontline puts it, he's "a born huckster for the market." That helped cement in peoples' minds the idea that Wall Street is where fortunes are made -- and if you're not a part of it, either by working there or by leaving your nest egg with its money magicians, you're missing out.

Newsweek's daily serving of news and views from around the world.

So, About That Good Governance...: For the past few years, China's no-strings-attached investments had flooded Africa, replacing risk-averse Western investors in the scramble for resources. But with global commodities prices tumbling and the continent's chaos increasing, Chinese companies are starting to look for more security for their money.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Alan Greenspan writes in the FT that banks should not be allowed to grow too big. He recommendeds graduated capital requirements to keep them honest.

Responsibility to (Not) Protect: What do steel pipes, toys, and oil have in common? They are all subject to new tariffs introduced during the downturn. A new WTO report warns that this year's steady buildup of protectionist measures around the world is threatening to "slowly strangle" free trade and undercut stimulus spending.

If the IMF's Walls Could Talk: A must-read from The Atlantic detailing how the financial sector grew into the behemoth that it did, starting around 1980. Yada, yada, yada, you say? Like Wall Street ever employed a bunch of angels? Not exactly, but check out the graphic in this blog teaser to the story to see why the 80s changed everything.

Finding Common Ground on Cars: Despite the buzz surrounding the German-American split on stimulus spending, Barack Obama and Angela Merkel agreed in a Thursday chat to coordinate their efforts to rescue U.S. car giant General Motors and its German subsidiary Opel.

Diplomacy, Check; Economy, Next: Having positioned itself as a diplomatic way through to Hamas and Hezbollah, Syria is now looking to capitalize on its friendlier image. Leaders have promised to liberalize the largely state-controlled economy and have opened the country's first stock exchange.

As an American, I of course love the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency. I just took a trip to Costa Rica, and was able to pay for almost everything in greenbacks. Globally traded commodities like oil are priced in dollars. It's the de facto language of global finance. And since every country needs some dollars for international transactions, the U.S. has access to lots and lots of cash, enabling us to borrow cheaply. 

So naturally, all this talk of the dollar losing its preeminent status worries me a little. A small furor began on Monday when Zhou Xiaochaun, China's central bank governor (i.e. their Ben Bernanke), released an essay calling for an "international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations." Translation: "Now that you guys are printing money to prop up your banks, we expect inflation in the U.S., which will erode the value of the $1 trillion in U.S. currency we hold and cause us to lose our shirts. We want to diversify." (You can find more background on this idea in Rana's post yesterday about her conversations with Joe Stiglitz and Jim Rogers.)

That might have been the end of the story -- developing countries make audacious statements all the time -- except that everyone's taking the idea very seriously (including Joe and Jim). Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said he's "very open" to a global reserve currency; after he said that, the dollar's value plunged, and he had to backtrack. That wasn't enough to quash the issue, though. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown says that currency issues will definitely be on the agenda at the upcoming G20 meeting.

So naturally I've become a little worried that I might have to bring renminbi or yen on my next Costa Rican vacation. Luckily, I thought to check in with Brad Setser, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on China and currency and just an all-around smart guy. On his blog, he writes that "The United States shouldn’t -- in my view -- be opposed to the development of an Asian reserve currency, or a set of Asian reserve currencies, that generally float against the dollar and the euro."

Setser rightly points out that after World War II, European nations pegged their currencies to the dollar -- just like China does today. They eventually gave up on the dollar as a reserve currency, and moved first to the German deutschmark and, eventually, the euro. "That hasn't been bad for the U.S.," says Setser. "Moves in the euro/dollar [exchange rate] have allowed needed economic adjustments between the U.S. and Europe to take place." In other words, if China were less dependent on buying dollars, it might be a good thing for both countries.

I don't see the dollar going away anytime soon, but it wouldn't be an unadulterated bad thing if it were a little less important than it is today.  

Okay, I get it -- you're busy, you've got kids, a job, a mortgage to (hopefully) pay. You haven't had time to navigate the alphabet soup of the financial crisis -- CDO, LBO, CDS, SIV. But it's getting a little hard to ignore, what with even late-night talk show hosts talking about hedge funds and derivatives with the President.

Luckily, there are plenty of accessible, easy-to-understand resources out there by now, so it's easy to get up to speed.

The most recent one we've seen is this video by Jonathan Jarvis, a graduate student at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design. It is not only hugely informative (my Newsweek colleague Adam Kushner calls it "the best distillation I've seen") but also a great piece of eye-candy. Design and graphics snobs will rejoice.

Part 1:

Part 2:

If you've got a bit more time on your hands, public-radio show This American Life put together two hour-long programs about The Great Panic of 2008. The first, from way back in May 2008, explains the origins of the crisis in "The Giant Pool of Money" sloshing around the globe, and why all that money led to dodgy mortgages. The second show -- aptly named "Another Frightening Show About the Economy" -- dates back to last October, and provides a better explanation of credit-default swaps than anything else I've heard or seen.

If you need more, blogger and journalist Matt Thompson has put together a great, explanatory site over at The Money Meltdown. It's a bit old at this point -- he put it together in the early days of the crisis, back in October -- but links to some timeless material, including the This American Life shows mentioned above.

Newsweek's daily serving of news and views from around the world.

Geithner Tightens the Knot on Wall Street: Geithner is expected to come out today with yet another announcement about a new program, this time a sweeping expansion of federal regulation of the financial system. One agency--probably the Fed--gets control of the regulatory bodies, which supposedly will be reformed themselves in coming months.

Brazil and the Future of the Economy: President Luiz Inacio da Silva opines in the FT that a new economic order will emerge out of the present unpleasantness, and he hopes it will be free of the "dogmas" that long characterized policy prescriptions for countries like his.

Containing the Developed World's Storm: George Soros writes of why and how the IMF and the G20 might protect the developing world from the "storm created in the developed world." He advocates long-term strengthening of the IMF.

The Winter of Czech Discontent: Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, currently the president of the European Parliament, slammed Obama's plan as the "road to hell," just after he was ousted by his own country's parliament in a no-confidence vote over--you guessed it--his handling of the economy.

Tunis, the New Dubai?: As Dubai's optimisim crumbles into the sand from whence it came, Tunisia is positioning itself to rise up next. It's pumping $25 billion into building the tallest tower in Africa and seeing a 38 percent increase in foreign direct investment, at a time when most emerging economies are being left in the lurch.

A Tour of Global Frustration: NPR's podcast today takes us to China, Sweden, and Egypt to get the word on the street about anger and the economy. Most interesting is a bit on Egypt's own Bernie Madoff, and why popular opinion has turned not against him, but rather against the people who invested with him.

Gordon Brown gets publicly filleted by EU parliamentarian (and instant blogohero) Daniel Hannan, who dubs him the Devalued Prime Minister. Awwwww, snap!

A week or so ago, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was “a little bit worried” about the stability of the U.S. dollar. Now, it appears he’s really sweating it, because the Chinese just came out in favor of ditching the dollar and replacing it with a new global reserve currency system. As Nobel Laureate and Columbia professor Joe Stiglitz, who just returned from meeting with financial leaders in China, told me today, “the Chinese are worried that they’ve worked so hard to save this $2 trillion in reserve currency, and they are going to see it blown away by inflation” as the U.S. continues to print money to bail itself out of the financial crisis.

So, what’s the solution? Tomorrow at the United Nations, Stiglitz and some Chinese and Russians officials will propose a new reserve system which would allow hard-hit countries to pull from a new “special drawing rights” fund at the IMF, rather than pouring more money into potentially devalued dollars. It's a play on the "global greenbacks" idea that Stiglitz first put out there in his book, "Making Globalization Work." The idea is to keep poor and rich nations alike spending and buoying the global economy, rather than buying up T-bills that then sit underground collecting dust. As Stiglitz points out, this might also fix the problem of “poor countries basically lending money to the U.S. for free.”

I also spoke today with the legendary investor Jim Rogers (who, along with George Soros, founded the Quantum Fund way back when). He’s all for ditching the dollar as a reserve currency (in fact, Rogers predicts we’ll see numerous currency crises in the next few years), but proposes a more radical investment solution. “If I were running the Chinese central bank, I’d buy commodities—oil, wheat, zinc. They are the only things with solid fundamentals these days. I mean, the fundamentals at Citigroup and GM certainly aren't getting any better.” Rogers is one of many predicting a new run up in commodities as a result of the financial crisis, as people flock to real assets like gold, food, and oil as a hedge against print money inflation. The Chinese, of course, had been snapping up African and Mideast energy assets left and right even before the crisis. Just this week, the Chinese engineering firm HuaFu was rumored to be the new Asian “partner” in a big project to develop liquid natural gas in Iran. If there’s one thing the financial crisis will bolster, it will likely be petro-politics.>

The list of most dangerous professions includes jobs like Bering Strait crab fishermen and Pacific Northwest logger. A new contender: AIG executive. After the collapsing insurance giant, which has accepted $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money, announced it was paying out $165 million in bonuses to top employees -- including many in the Financial Products division, the Mordor-like seat of financial evil -- populist rage crescendoed. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said he wanted to sue to prevent the payment. Protesters arranged bus tours of the execs' lavish Connecticut mansions, where they've hired private security guards. Sen. Charles Grassley said the lucky execs should "resign, or go commit suicide." You know you're unpopular when a sitting senator wishes hari kari upon you.

But are we beginning to see a backlash against the backlash? Maybe not, but some of the targets are beginning to strike back. Last night, the New York Times posted the resignation letter of Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president at AIG's reviled Financial Products division, known as AIG-FP, which paints a more nuanced view of the well-compensated execs:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

I think Megan McArdle gets it right when she asks, "Are we better off because a skilled trader has left, and his book will now be wound down by someone who doesn't know it, or the markets, as well?" Populist outrage is to be expected and, to a large extent, is justified; but receiving taxpayer money shouldn't preclude a firm from paying its own people. In fact, if we the taxpayers ever want to get paid back, we'll probably have to tolerate a lavish bonus here and there. 

Newsweek's daily serving of news and views on the economy from around the world.

Mehs on Obama's Press Conference: WaPo's editorial captures the CW on the president's performance defending his budget in prime time last night. Media flacks were roundly befuddled by their colleagues' lack of attention to foreign policy questions. In case you forgot, the U.S. is still fighting two wars.

Brazil's Problem with Rosy Glasses: After President Lula da Silva's projection that the global economic crisis would produce only a "ripple" in Brazil proved false, the WSJ says he is under fire for disingenuously cheerleading to keep investors from pulling out.

Arab Unity, Delayed: Five Gulf states have abandoned their plans to develop a shared currency by 2010, long considered an untenable deadline, says Kuwait's Al-Watan.

Toyota, anyone? Anyone?: Japanese exports plunged by about half in February, a record decline for the world's second-largest economy. Imports were not far behind, signaling big problems for the broader economy.

Blast from the Past (sort of) : Hank Paulson takes to the pages of the FT to explain why financial regulation needs to be reformed and ratcheted up. Without a trace of irony.

Newsweek's daily serving of news and views on the economy from around the world.

The Geithner Asset Plan: The Wall Street Journal grudgingly endorses the Geithner plan, pointing to the market rally as evidence that any plan--whatever its pitfalls--is better than uncertainty.

The Bank Rescue: The New York Times offers a less optimistic assessment. Its editorial says buying up toxic assets puts taxpayers at too much risk, instead proposing that the government dissolve and restructure failing banks. Joseph Stiglitz agrees.

The Importance of Empty Words: FT's Gideon Rachman predicts that insincere gestures will probably be all that come out of the upcoming G20 summit in London. But, he insists, those gestures at least set a standard for free trade at a time when the world's big players are tempted toward protectionism.

Out With the Dollar:  China's central bank wants to replace the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the International Monetary Fund. Seems a variation on a theme from yesterday, when Joseph Stiglitz's panel called for a UN-run global reserve system.

Paydirt on Agricultural Land: An interesting bit in the Economist about one real estate market defying the conventional wisdom. High food prices have apparently led people to buy up farmland in several countries, pushing up prices even in a beleaguered area like Ohio.

Maybe it’s time to resurrect the idea of economic decoupling. For those who don’t remember, that was the idea—much touted at the beginning of the financial crisis—that poor but up and coming nations like China, India, Brazil, and Russia (aka the BRICs) weren’t going to follow the US and Europe into recession. After all, their economies were red hot, and they were growing their own new middle class of aspirational consumers eager to compete head on with Americans for compact cars, flat screen TVs and iPods.

Unfortunately, the idea lost its luster when emerging market stock indexes tanked 60 percent last year, and Cassandras like Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach pointed out that consumer spending in China, the world’s fourth largest economy, represents only a tiny fraction of the American consumer wallet. Translation: Don’t count on poor nations to save the world.

That’s still true, but perhaps only in the short term. Fund manager Antoine van Agtmael, the guy who happened to invent the term “emerging markets” about 30 years ago, says that even as the US and Europe flounder, the recovery has already begun in emerging markets, in part because they’ve got their act much more together than we do over here (plenty of other smart people, like Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neill, agree with him – check out his guest essay this week). “China has a much bigger stimulus plan as a percentage of their economy than the U.S. does. Russia has plenty of reserves to deal with the over-leveraging of the oligarchs. India may have a budget deficit but it's far less dependent on exports, and Brazil is incomparably healthier than it was in the mid 1990s.” Van Agtmael, who has gotten very rich predicting the future of these markets, notes that these economies will soon account for 1/3 of global GDP – double their share a decade ago. While the U.S. and European economies will shrink about 3 percent this year, China is still growing at 7 percent, and India around 5 – not bad for a global downturn.

What’s more, he says, investors who put their money in the emerging markets actually did a lot better than they think, even accounting for the crash. When emerging markets hit bottom after their 60 percent drop, investors lost only three years of returns. After the U.S. markets tanked, they lost 10 years worth, and in other rich countries they lost five. Since last October, emerging markets as a whole are up 20 percent. These little engines that could just keep going…

...and for more about that, check out my longer piece on the matter, posted here.

Newsweek's daily serving of news and views on the economy from around the world.  

Tim Geithner's Economic Elixir, Revealed: Timothy Geithner attempts to save face after a rough week with an editorial in the WSJ defending his various economic recovery programs. Details TK in an 8:45 a.m. briefing on the plan.

Barack Obama, International PR Wizard: Barack Obama goes the global route, hitting up the op-ed section of 31 papers around the world as Geithner's wingman on the new proposal.

The World Is Round, Once Again: CFR's Brad Setzer illustrates why the world's crumbling financial system is bringing an end to the "Chimerica" of Bretton Woods II. One stunning indicator of the scope of this monster: Lehman's collapse had a bigger impact on international money flows than did 9/11.

The Wisdom of Continental Drift: James Surowiecki explains why Europeans are the new conservatives. Americans, by default, are the new wild-eyed leftists. And that may be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Stiglitz & the UN Call for G20 Overhaul: A panel of 18 economists led by Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz is proposing a new UN-based Global Economic Council to replace the G20. The group would have its own global reserve system and would better serve the developing world, they say.

Newsweek's daily serving of news and views on the economy from around the world. 

Anti-Populist Rage: The wonkosphere is abuzz with scorn after the House overwhelmingly approved a tax that would snatch bonuses from the high rollers at bailed out banks. The Economist scolded Congress for pandering. The tax wonks at Brookings seconded the motion. So did a highly irritated Charles Krauthammer, who published a diatribe in today's Washington Post.

Econorumble: Krugman vs. Europe: Earlier this week, Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman blasted European central bankers for their lackluster response to the struggling economy. Their chair came to Europe's defense today withan op-ed response. In like fashion, Europe's bankers rebuffed calls to strengthen stimulus efforts, but the FT thinks the Fed's latest booster is putting new pressure on Brussels to step up its response.

Battle of the Asian Giants: Spats over toys, tires and iron ore are stoking tensions between China and India, as the two Asian giants try to pry open each other's markets and soften the impact of the global economic slowdown.

Happy Nowruz (P.S. Please Stop Building Nukes): President Barack Obama reached out an olive branch to Iran last night with a video recording of a holiday greeting. Iran's PressTV was only mildly pleased, noting that last week Obama extended sanctions against Iran first imposed in 1995. A cautionary tale from last week about Iran's economic predicament provides some insight into where this conversation might be headed.

Out of Africa: Reuters wonders if investors are growing wary about Africa, as recent unrest has upset a period cautious stability on the continent. The Economist, warning of crashing economies and failed states, sees an even broader worldwide pattern concerning developing economies.

Our colleague Sarah Ball, progenitor of Newsweek's Pop Vox blog, said it best: "Introductory blog posts kind of make my skin crawl." We write. We link. We post. 'Nuff said. Welcome.

But there are already a lot of blogs out there on business, the economy, and, more specifically, the global financial crisis -- just take a gander at our blogroll to the left. One might reasonably ask: Why on earth do we need another?

Well, for one, a lot of the best commentary out there is being written by economists in their native tongue, a rare language known as financialese or econo-speak. We, on the other hand, think the English language is perfectly adequate. We're good translators, no Rosetta Stone program necessary (sorry, Michael), and plan to keep the technical gibberish to a minimum.

For another, we're not your typical bloggers. We've got nothing against the stereotype of the pajama-clad geek tapping away in his basement. But with the ability to draw on Newsweek's smart, prolific team of reporters spanning the world from Beijing to Moscow, we think we're in a pretty good position to bring you the best, most urgent links, news, and analysis, no matter where they originate. And we have an overflowing stable of regular guests -- including experts like Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Schiller -- ready to jump in.

There are a lot of other reasons we think you'll want to add this blog to your RSS reader, but we'll let the posts speak for themselves.