Periscope

What Goes Around: The New Hot Money
By Barrett Sheridan

Government investment funds, particularly in oil states, are the new giants of global finance. The biggest, from the United Arab Emirates, controls three quarters of a trillion dollars, which is why Westerners are scared. G7 Finance ministers have called on the IMF, World Bank and OECD to investigate the funds' transparency and accountability. SEC Chairman Christopher Cox warned the funds "call into question the adequacy" of current regulations and could torpedo investor confidence. Even the arch-capitalist Wall Street Journal is calling for tighter regulation. This brings to mind the crisis of 1997-98, which Asian leaders blamed on hot money originating from Western banks and hedge funds. Back then Western institutions generally defended the free movement of capital. What has changed, of course, is the direction of the potentially destabilizing flows.

The Digit

The protectionist impulse grips America with increasing fervor. Members of the U.S. Congress have floated 45 antitrade or anti-China proposals in the last two sessions alone.

Politics Of Disease: Where Did AIDS Begin?
By Mary Carmichael

Last week Haiti's Ambassador to Washington, Raymond Joseph, was flooded with irate phone calls about Michael Worobey, a biologist at the University of Arizona. Worobey just published a paper showing that HIV first hitchhiked to America around 1969 in the body of a single person, who caught the disease in Haiti.

Worobey says he "in no way" places blame on Haitians, but they already feel persecuted because so many early cases were Haitian, and now they fear more discrimination. "How do we know," Joseph asks, "that a homosexual infected in America didn't bring HIV to Haiti instead?"