China/US: President Barack Obama will have a friendly meeting with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao next week. They two countries depend on each other too much for anything else. In a few years Hu or his successor may be able to tell the American leader what to do. But not yet.

Not yet the G2, but maybe the G1?

Business Standard

Equities jumped 10 per cent three years ago, when China said it would buy up banking shares in the market. They barely budged after a similar announcement on Monday. The difference is credibility. A sustained financial crisis has shown that governments around the world have a limited ability to make things better. Beijing has a lot of credibility to lose.

The hapless club

After a century-long nap, I awoke in 2012. The world is changed, but not utterly.

Progress or regress

The financial crisis showed that there are serious problems with the architecture of all of the main investment types. A new instrument &mdash; bonds with payments that vary with GDP &mdash; could prove a happier medium.

Trills not spills

When Philip Clarke took over from the Sir Terry Leahy as Tesco&rsquo;s chief executive in March 2011, he seemed to have one of the sweetest corporate inheritances around. The company was strong in its British home market and growing well elsewhere, although the US expansion remained a work in progress.

Every little hurts 

The main reason there&rsquo;s a euro zone debt crisis is that investors think there is one. But, the opinion of that fickle group may be changing.

Tidal shift

Asset prices may have risen because the global economy is looking stronger, and that strength may in part be credited to stimulative monetary and fiscal policies around the world. Alternatively, the economy may have nothing much to do with it. Financial markets may be strong because those stimulative policies have put more cash in investors' hands. In truth, no one knows what's really going on.

Fairground attraction

The Tale of Hellenic Foolishness appears to be over. A mix of writedowns and new money, with more of the latter, has come to the rescue. Greece&rsquo;s chapter in the financial crisis epic reads much the same as the prologue on subprime mortgages &mdash; too much foolish lending ends in a sudden stop that threatens to destroy global finance, until finally there&rsquo;s a political rescue.

Can't put it down

It&rsquo;s just a symbol. The UK government is borrowing like there&rsquo;s no tomorrow, so issuing a few billion pounds of 100-year or perpetual debt would be a drop in its trillion-pound net debt ocean. In comparison to the Bank of England&rsquo;s holdings, which are on their way to &pound;325 billion, the sale of uneconomic investments to the private sector looks paltry.

Ultra is the new normal

Crowds still stream past the body of Mao Zedong, preserved in a mausoleum in the centre of Beijing. Deng Xiaoping, Mao&rsquo;s successor at the top of the Chinese Communist Party, had his ashes scattered at sea. Later leaders have been even more modest. Bo Xilai, the son of a revolutionary leader and formerly a rising star in Chinese politics, seems to have thought that personality cults could make a comeback. He has been proved wrong.

Bland ambition

Shale gas accounts for less than one per cent of worldwide energy use at present. But fracking is a growth business, and shale oil prospects are also altering the global hydrocarbon equation. The additional supply could change the geo-political and geo-financial landscape.

Edward Hadas