Rana Foroohar

American consumers got a little economic present this week in the form of falling prices -- the CPI, or consumer price index, which is the measure of price inflation, finally dipped into negative territory for the first time since 1955.

Why Goldman's $10 billion offer is a bad deal.

I went to see the new production of West Side Story at the Palace Theatre this weekend. The singing (much of it in Spanish this time round) and the dancing were amazing (female viewers will immediately want to buy flouncy skirts and take mambo lessons).

Migrant workers are among the most vulnerable in any nation. There's been a lot of worry during this financial crisis that growing unemployment in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere would result in a wave of migrant job losses, forcing immigrants to return to their home countries (and back to even more precarious situations).

  Thanks for all the comments about my recent post, "If Jobs Are Being Cut, Why Aren't Paychecks, Too?," including this one, from Mac101: "The average American worker has been losing money in their paychecks for quite a while.

Sure, commodities prices go down in the long term—but in the long term, we're all dead.

What's going on? Nothing very good, according to economists Julian Jessop and Paul Ashworth at Capital Economics in London. In a research note out this week, Capital pointed out that while rising inflation prior to the onset of the crisis has kept American wages from collapsing, that same inflation has also cut the value of the dollar, and so decreased workers' spending power.

Why American financial institutions will survive the crisis and competition from China.

That's very much counter to the conventional wisdom, which is that the U.S. banks are done for. Certainly, if you look at the league tables, there's a new financial world order already.

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?

Many Newsweek readers already know that our columnist Barton Biggs, the legendary Wall Street strategist and hedge funder, believes markets are set for a new bull run.

Very interesting op-ed piece in the Financial Times today which questions the conventional wisdom that countries can spend their way to economic growth.

Thanks much for all the great comments on my Cheap Oil Forever post, including this one from "Vigilance": "Oil prices' recent highs were fueled in large part by the fact that speculators comprised a massive share of those "investing" in oil.

How world leaders missed the boat in London.

As playwright Arthur Miller once observed, "an era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." That's exactly what Newsweek columnist Ruchir Sharma (who happens to have the rather impressive day job of running emerging markets for Morgan Stanley Investment Management when he's not cranking out copy for us) recently observed to me.

Despite all the promises today at the G20 to ban tax havens, stop protectionism, and hold those greedy bankers accountable, the truth is that world leaders missed the boat.

This just in from our Man In London, William Underhill, fresh from the G20:  

It's official – unemployment in the rich world is growing at the fastest rate since the post-war period, according to the Paris based OECD, which represents the world's advanced economies.

Give the Chinese free health care. Goldman Sachs' chief economist Jim O'Neill told me that he thinks the Chinese government's recent announcement that it plans to offer basic state health care to 90 percent of its population by 2011 is the "most important policy decision in the world at the moment." That's saying something given the slew of executive decisions being taken every other day in the U.S, Europe and elsewhere to avert recession.

As we all know by now, the only companies making serious money these days are those that sell stuff that is cheap – Wal-Mart and McDonald's were the lone stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average that ended 2008 with a gain.   What's not as well known is how fast a group of new emerging market giants is coming on thanks to the recession.

Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz on the coming global economic order.

How can China keep growing in the midst of a global recession that's taking everyone else down? The conventional wisdom is that it can't -- even China bulls like Morgan Stanley's Ruchir Sharma have said so in Newsweek.

That was legendary investor Jim Rogers' advice to me earlier this week. We were chatting about his continued bullishness on commodities (back in 2005, he wrote "Hot Commodities: How Anyone Can Invest Profitably In the World's Best Market"), despite the recent fall in oil prices.

A week or so ago, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was "a little bit worried" about the stability of the U.S. dollar. Now, it appears he's really sweating it, because the Chinese just came out in favor of ditching the dollar and replacing it with a new global reserve currency system.

Maybe it's time to resurrect the idea of economic decoupling. For those who don't remember, that was the idea—much touted at the beginning of the financial crisis—that poor but up and coming nations like China, India, Brazil, and Russia (aka the BRICs) weren't going to follow the US and Europe into recession.

What's called a 'global' recession is in fact shrinking economies mainly in the West, not the East.

Before the global downturn, 75-year-old Sheldon G. Adelson, Chairman of The Las Vegas Sands Corp., was the ultimate high roller. For a time America's third-richest man, he helped rebrand Las Vegas as a family spot and turn Macau into a top gambling destination with his investments.

Plunging oil prices have created an unexpected diplomatic bright spot in the global recession by weakening unfriendly regimes.

Fears over global hunger are back, this time driven by both high food prices and plunging incomes. As the global recession deepens, unemployment is rising, but the price of staple foods is not falling with other commodities, like oil.