The H-1B visa is one of those policies that everyone loves to hate. It gives skilled immigrants -- scientists, engineers, researchers, etc. -- the right to live and work in the U.S. for six years, so nativists hate it right off the bat. But in fields that attract too few American citizens, such as computer programming, it has become an essential part of the hiring process. But tech executives and globalization advocates loathe it because the cap is too low, and it's devilishly hard to get one. The U.S. gives out only 85,000 each year, and 20,000 of those are reserved for applicants with advanced degrees. The demand for these visas is so strong that generally all 85,000 are given out within the first couple days of filing, which begins April 1.

But not this year. Today U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services took the rather unprecedented step of announcing that, after a full week of accepting applications, it still hadn't reached the cap.

There are two ways to look at this. The half-glass-full explanation would be that this is just a supply issue. The U.S. job market is the worst it's been in 70 years, and unemployment is expected to hit 10 percent by the end of the year. There are simply fewer jobs for immigrants, skilled or not, to apply to, and thus less need for H-1B visas.

The glass-half-empty explanation would paint this as a demand issue. Perhaps the U.S. has finally made life so difficult for the aspiring immigrant, what with airport security and visa caps and legally-permissible xenophobia, that they've decided enough is enough. Besides, job opportunities have improved greatly in home countries like India and China. Why bother with the hassle of being an immigrant in America when you can make nearly as much in your birth country? Recent research by Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University supports this idea. America is becoming a less attractive destination for the highly-educated immigrant. That will damage our competitiveness in the long run.

I bet the half-glass-full reason explains about 80 percent of this year's slack demand for the visas. But if I were a congressman, I'd start thinking very seriously about why my country is no longer as attractive to the rest of the world.

Aaron Favilla / AP

Two weeks ago our crack digital team released a package on the history of greed, which included a photographic parade of some of the greediest figures of all time. Nestled amongst the likes of Genghis Khan, Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff was the Philippines' own Imelda Marcos, the widow of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1986. During that time, Ms. Marcos achieved notoriety for her fashionable taste -- while the average Filipino lived on less than $2 a day, Ms. Marcos jetted to New York and Rome for $5 million shopping sprees, and built up an impressive collection of 3,000 pairs of shoes.

It seemed fitting, then, to open the gallery with the above image of Ms. Marcos, her rouged cheeks, jade earrings and blinged-out ring fingers a perfect glimpse into modern materialism.

Apparently, Ms. Marcos doesn't disagree. NEWSWEEK's selection of her provoked a bit of controversy back in the Pacific island nation, enough that Ms. Marcos eventually had to address the issue herself:

I plead guilty. For me, greedy is giving. I was first lady for 20 years, you have to be greedy first to give to all. It is natural. The only things we keep in life are those we give away.

Righhhtttttt. Check out the video of her "defense" here. (Her English-language statement starts about 35 seconds in; footage of some glorious shoes and jewels is just after the minute mark.) Something tells me that the perfectly matching flower brooch and purple necklace she's wearing, should she choose to "be greedy" and "give to all," could support several Manila families for quite some time.

But give her points for being a First Amendment fan: She says she won't sue NEWSWEEK for the honorific.  

That’s been the big question ever since the financial crisis started – is the U.S. going into a period of long term stagnation, like the Japanese did after their banking crisis in the 1990s? We’ve written quite a lot about this topic; my favorite piece on the subject is by our columnist Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets for Morgan Stanley Investment Management, who said back in October, “the best hope for the U.S. is stagnation.” His view at the time was that we might be in for a much steeper and sharper correction. According to Sharma and many others, a decade of zero percent growth would actually be good news (remember, Japan is still the world’s second largest economy, even after their crisis). Sharma believed Hayek – that long forgotten Austrian economist who thought that major bubbles had to be corrected by Depression like periods of pain – might just be right.

But now that there are signs of some economic pick-up in both the U.S. and the world at large, it’s time to revisit the question of whether the U.S. is indeed turning Japanese—or whether we might pull out of this crisis sooner rather than later. I recently read an interesting research note today from RBC Capital Markets in London, which pointed out that as the financial crisis in the U.S. has progressed, the parallels with Japan’s post bubble period “appear to have deepened and multiplied.” The parallels, in case you’ve forgotten, would include: massive dysfunction in the banking sector, regulatory ineptitude, the scale of losses involved, the total collapse of bank lending, exploding budget deficits, and interest rates that are effectively at zero, meaning that central bankers have little room for any further maneuvering of monetary policy.

But the report also notes a number of very important differences in Japan and the U.S., the key one being the speed at which the crisis is unfolding. In Japan, bankers and government officials alike spent years trying to cover up the magnitude of the problem. The Japanese banking sector wasn’t really put back on its feet until 2005, fifteen years after the crisis began—that fact more than any other is what prolonged the pain. While there’s certainly there’s been plenty of dysfunction in dealing with the current financial crisis on Wall Street and in Washington, there has also, within a mere 18 months, been a fair bit of restructuring and ring fencing of toxic assets (there are some people, like economist Ann Lee, who actually believe that U.S. banks will emerge post crisis stronger and more financially dominate around the world – more on that in another post).

All this points to the fact that there are major cultural differences between the U.S. and Japan. America is still quite an open society, despite any protectionist posturing. In Japan, nearly two decades on from the crisis, minor foreign takeovers and outside investment into domestic companies still provoke hand wringing, and admitting fault still carries a stigma. If we want to stay on track to avoid our own Lost Decade, perhaps the best takeaway from the Japanese experience is that we should face up to our problems early and often – even when they seem insurmountable.

It’s the big question hanging over America’s beleaguered economy: Whence is the next great wave of growth going to emerge? After the dotcom bubble burst at the end of the ‘90s, we moved immediately to the great Wall Street bubble of the ‘00s. First the investment dollars and best minds flowed into Silicon Valley and its various satellites around the country. Then they washed in great manic waves into the world of derivatives and financial arcana. Now that that is gone too, it’s not clear what’s next. What’s going to be the New New Thing? But Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, says that the question should not be posed quite so starkly. The information technologies that drove the dotcom phenomenon are still with us, he points out, and they will supply a good part of the revival of the U.S. economy when it comes—especially in driving innovation in the environmental and energy sectors. “Over the long term, the computer-slash-internet technologies have dramatically changed the way information has been used,” Chu told me in a recent interview. One outcome of the dotcom bubble, for example, is that “Google is now a verb,” Chu says. Another example of how both the dotcom and housing bubbles left some permanent progress behind, Chu says, is in the large number of fiber-connected homes, which surpassed 2 million at the height of the housing mania in 2007. Maybe this is just more happy talk from an administration that is ever-eager to jawbone up the economy, especially considering that the tech sector is still hurting (Sun Microsystems, which never fully recovered from the dotcom burst, has been engaged in wary talks with IBM). Still, Chu’s take is something to think about. Maybe bubbles aren’t all bad after all.

Under the (Black) Sea: Italy and Russia cemented ties with a flurry of business deals yesterday, including a $4.1 billion sale involving Gazprom, Russia's national oil giant. Vladimir Putin watched over the dealings. Silvio Berlusconi was set to attend, but instead remained in earthquake-hit Italy. At a time when most European countries have cooled relations with Russia, the transaction strengthens a partnership planning to jointly construct a pipeline underneath the Black Sea.

Nuclear Finances, Busted: A New York-based prosecutor has issued a 118-count indictment of the head of a Chinese firm for using front companies and aliases to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran--essentially, using the U.S. banking system to facilitate the sale of materials used to build nuclear weapons. Iran is (perhaps not incidentally), a major supplier of oil and gas to China. It could be a sticky spot for Hillary Clinton, who has been cozying up to Chinese offficials.

Making the Rich Pay: The Economist has a solid, well-reasoned post (shock!) about the relative merits of progressive taxes and consumption taxes. A good follow-up to Clive Crook's point from last week that the U.S. tax structure is more progressive than it's given credit for, due to Europe's high consumption taxes. America should consider a VAT that can reinforce, not undermine, the progressive approach, they argue.

Thumbs Up on Geithner: Everybody chill--the O-team is providing steady, rational leadership, says Ricardo Caballero, the head of MIT's econ department. He argues the systemic overhaul some of his colleagues have been clamoring for will need to wait until after the worst of the storm has passed. Worth reading to the end for a particularly note-worthy point: this ain't Japan, folks.

To Print or Not to Print: The inflation v. deflation divide widened yesterday, as the ECB's Juergen Stark criticized the G20's decision to boost the IMF's SDRs, calling it "helicopter money." Reuters econ bloggers have an interesting point about the spat; while the Great Depression serves as the America backdrop for all things cataclysmic, the hyperinflation of the 1920s informs the German view. As they put it, think wheelbarrows.