Crash Survival Zone

By Fareed Zakaria

It is becoming increasingly clear that the story of the global economy is a tale of two worlds. In one, there is only gloom and doom, and in the other there is light and hope. In the traditional bastions of wealth and power—America, Europe and Japan—it is difficult to find much good news. [...]

Leaders in both Washington and Beijing have been fretting openly about the mutual dependence — some would say codependence — created by China’s vast holdings of United States bonds. But beyond the talk, the relationship is already changing with surprising speed.

China is growing more picky about which American debt it is willing to finance, and [...]

The green shoots of recovery are being liberally fertilised by Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, China and a bunch of stimulating central bankers. But their growth-promoting seeds are landing on exhausted soil.

The traditional global big spenders - US and UK consumers - have lost the cash machine of equity release that was funded by ever-rising house [...]

China has warned a top member of the US Federal Reserve that it is increasingly disturbed by the Fed’s direct purchase of US Treasury bonds.

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: “Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our [...]

Global energy demand is expected to soar 44 percent over the next two decades with most of the demand coming from developing countries such as China and Russia, the U.S. government’s top energy forecasting agency said on Wednesday.

The worldwide economic downturn has hit energy consumption, but an expected recovery next year could respark demand and [...]

Economist Nouriel Roubini on Wednesday said the end of the global recession is likely to occur at the end of the year rather than the middle, and that U.S. growth will remain below potential afterwards.

“We are not yet at the bottom of the U.S. and the global recession,” said Roubini. “The contraction is still occurring [...]

Reduced spending on energy threatens to slow the economic rebound, trigger a surge in prices and hurt future prosperity, the Group of Eight industrialized nations said at the close of their meeting in Rome.
“The current financial and economic crisis must not delay investments and programmed energy projects which are essential to economic recovery and sustainable [...]

The world economy has avoided “utter catastrophe” and industrialized countries could register growth this year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said on Monday.

“I will not be surprised to see world trade stabilize, world industrial production stabilize and start to grow two months from now,” Krugman told a seminar.

“I would not be surprised to see flat [...]

By Martin Wolf

Is the current crisis a watershed, with market-led globalisation, financial capitalism and western domination on the one side and protectionism, regulation and Asian predominance on the other? Or will historians judge it, instead, as an event caused by fools, signifying little? My own guess is that it will end up in between. It [...]

This week, I’m doing another book review, this time on “The Dollar Crisis” by Richard Duncan. Before I begin, I’ll make a prediction, since I’m an investor and my job is to predict. I increasingly believe that the dollar will collapse, and its ramifications could be as violent as when the credit markets cracked in [...]