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Since the first, dramatic interventions into the financial system by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve during the collapse of Bear Stearns a year ago, Timothy Geithner has based his approach on one underlying theory. The crisis, the former New York Fed president and now Treasury Secretary believes, is the result of the collapse of a shadow banking system that grew over the past 30 years to rival the traditional banking system in size but lacked all four of the safeguards that had been imposed after repeated collapses of the traditional system in the early part of the 20th...
...firm doesn't start a domino collapse among other companies doing business with it, thereby posing what regulators call "systemic risk" to the whole economy. "This is a prudent, carefully designed proposal to protect our financial system," Geithner said, arguing that if Treasury had had that power a year ago, it could have handled the collapses of Bear Stearns, Lehman and AIG very differently. Other Democrats said the power isn't so radical at all; the FDIC already takes over traditional banks on the verge of collapse - when the agency decides a firm is on the brink, it steps...
...Shanghai not long ago, I took a walk from my hotel along Nanjing Road to the Bund, the promenade on the banks of the Huangpu where visitors from China's hinterland gather to gaze across the river, awestruck, at the ultramodern skyscrapers of Pudong that have transformed the city's skyline in not much more than a decade. It wasn't what was on the far side, though, that got my attention: it was the traffic on the river itself, great container ships, chuffing lighters, bulk carriers, every sort of waterborne vessel you could imagine carrying every imaginable cargo, churning...
...least, they were. The economic crisis has hit world trade hard. Ports throughout the world are dramatically less busy than they were just a few months ago; air traffic is way down. Exports from Japan were almost 50% less in February compared with the same month in 2008; China's exports were down 26% in February. The World Trade Organization is predicting global trade will shrink by 9% this year, the steepest annual decline since World War II. This contraction is not only deep, it is also a latter-day rarity: global trade has increased continuously year after year since...
...Zimbabwe is facing its worst economic crisis since independence almost three decades ago. On top of its abandoned, worthless currency, the once prosperous agricultural economy is bankrupt. The country's new Finance Minister, Tendai Biti, announced on Wednesday that Harare has a monthly expenditure of about $100 million but can raise only $20 million a month. The government estimates that an average family of five requires about $550 a month, far more than what most people earn. (See pictures of Zimbabweans voting...