Jeffrey E. Garten

As job creation and an economic growth stall, the Obama administration is being criticized not just from all parts of the political spectrum in the U.S. but also from big business, which increasingly believes that the president harbors a thinly camouflaged antibusiness bias.

Now it's all about the political risks.

Moneymen are still calling the shots.

Why The United States will come out of the crisis on top.

When I was a trade official in the Clinton administration, I discovered that the British government was unusually talented at writing summaries after difficult negotiations.

The massive intrusion of government into national economics could spark disastrous protectionism.

World leaders have spent trillions on confused, inadequate rescue plans. They need to spend more.

It would be a showstopper if Obama made China his first presidential trip abroad and brought top officials.

On both sides of the Atlantic, governments are considering ways to buffer their automobile industries against the economic downturn. The EU has just agreed on a $50 billion package to help its companies meet new environmental standards.

Individual governments are trying to manage the global financial crisis. What's really needed is a gathering of high-level experts to report back in a few months.

Don't assume that the sum of national crisis-management activities will create a desirable framework for the longer term.

Empty words from the West encourage the Kremlin. But there are ways to push Russia in the right direction.

Priority must now be given to expanding free trade and cross-border capital flows in the face of greater regulation.

The Fannie and Freddie crisis is a great illustration of how interconnected the world of finance has become.

A provocative book on the rise of Asia highlights the need to move beyond old notions of East and West.

So far, serious currency turmoil hasn't been a part of the subprime-induced credit crunch. Nevertheless, the monetary system could be more fragile than it appears.

Whatever political spin is put on the meeting of cabinet members and ministers from the United States and China this week in Washington, the event has already failed.

Not many Americans outside Washington care whether the bilateral trade agreements that the United States has negotiated with Panama, Colombia and Peru contain provisions to protect labor standards in those countries, or whether such treaties are ratified by Congress this spring.

As public interest in the threat of climate change grows in the United States, a large number of companies are announcing that they are going green. Some institutional invest ors are cajoling those who aren't.

Emotions ran high at last week's meeting of G-7 finance ministers in Essen, Germany. Euro-zone officials were annoyed with their Japanese counterparts because the yen had sunk to all-time lows against the euro, signaling trouble for the Continent's exporters.

For several months, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and a number of top guns on Wall Street have been screaming that U.S. capital markets are losing their competitiveness to London and Hong Kong.

Earlier this month I spent several days in Singapore meeting with government and business executives for a Yale project to identify key trends in Asia. It was fascinating for what I heard, and what I did not hear.With most of the emerging markets in the region entering their fifth year of an economic boom, it is no surprise that sentiment is bullish.

Ten years ago, when the "big bang" hit London, a burst of deregulation reversed years of stagnation in the markets and propelled the City to become one of the world's biggest and most vibrant financial centers.

Over the next decade, the biggest change in the world's corporate hierarchy will be the rise of companies from developing countries. Corporations such as China's Huawei (telecommunications equipment), India's Infosys (IT and business outsourcing services) and South Africa's SABMiller (beer and beverages) are already big global enterprises.

I have generally been a worrier when it comes to thinking about risks in an ever-shrinking global economy. But not now, not on one of the critical questions facing the world in 2006: whether countries such as China, India, Turkey, Russia and other emerging markets will continue to boom, or go bust, just as they did in 1997.

Global corporations, as we all know, are important for the return on investment they provide, the jobs they generate, the new technologies they develop, the products they offer.

The mood among the trade ministers gathering in Hong Kong this week is likely to be downbeat. That's because after two years of struggling to move global trade negotiations toward a conclusion, the 149 countries of the World Trade Organization have failed to bridge huge gaps in their respective positions.

The big news is often in the silence. that was certainly true in the case of Saudi Arabia's quiet entry into the World Trade Organization. Last week trade ambassadors in Geneva blessed the move, which will be made official at the upcoming summit in Hong Kong.

The world's attention will be focused on Busan, South Korea, this week, where the heads of state of some of the world's most dynamic economies will gather at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation annual meeting.

As leaders of Latin America and the Caribbean gather this week for the fourth Summit of the Americas, big-bang reform is probably the last thing on their minds.