Rana Foroohar

I want to respond to a reader who commented on yesterday's post about the possibility that the U.S. dollar might be replaced by a new type of currency known as an "SDR": Reader: "[You suggest in your post that] 'Americans won't be able to live quite as large as they have in the past.' This is a vague statement.

 

Check out this very interesting article from GlobalPost about how the financial crisis has led to a spike in conflict and violence around the world this year.

It seems so. For the first time since June 2007, growth forecasts for the world's rich nations are being revised upward, according to the latest OECD data.

Over the last few days, I've been talking with our Rio correspondent, Mac Margolis, about the future of Brazil, which has been one of the winners in the global financial crisis.

Oil may be up, but Russia, strangely, is down. Commodities prices, on which Russia's economy is ever dependent, have been rising for the past several months, leading some economists to predict a return to 3 percent growth (from the current negative-10 percent) by next year, and even higher figures in the future.

With oil prices on an unprecedented roller-coaster ride over the last year, our senior reporter Matthew Philips caught up with energy guru Dan Yergin, to talk about what effect petro-prices will have on the recovery.

You can't hold a good banker back, it seems. I had to laugh when I read the cover of the FT this morning, with a story on how Goldman Sachs, Barclays and others are finding ways to soften the burden of the new capital requirements being imposed on them in the wake of the financial crisis.

Sales of apartments, automobiles, and lots more are rising, but it's the government, not consumers, that's paying.

This latest financial crisis and global recession has been unique in all sorts of ways – from its length and depth, to the fact that almost nobody has come out unscathed.

Public debt is rising at its fastest rate since World War II, as nearly all major governments seek to stimulate their shaky economies. Who's most at risk from the ballooning debt bubble?

The word in Asia is that Hong Kong may be a has-been. In April, Chinese officials announced they want Shanghai to become a global financial center by 2020.

   

The green shoots keep coming in the US, but Continental Europe is still in a deep economic slump. I keep seeing forecasters changing their predictions of recovery from 2010 to 2011.

The merger is on hold. Maybe it should stay that way.

Beijing lost a fair bit of face yesterday when Chinalco, a Chinese state-backed aluminum company, was forced to walk away from a $19.5 billion offer to purchase a large chunk of Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.

China backs its own global market.