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The period from March 2009 was the year of wishful thinking. Central banks cut interest rates and governments opened their cheque books providing a flood of cheap money that gave the illusion of recovery and a normal functioning economy. By pouring a lot of water into a bucket with a large hole, the world sustained the impression that the receptacle was almost full.

An American bill imposing punitive tarifs on countries that undervalue their currencies is set to unleash a new trade war between the US and China. But in fact the whole global currency system is in a state of jeopardy. As confidence in the dollar drops, private investors are putting their faith in gold.

The debate on "global imbalances" has gone back to the future. The proposal from Tim Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, to target the current account takes us back to the preoccupations of John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944. Keynes, representing Britain, was obsessed with the dangers of asymmetric adjustment between surplus and deficit countries. The US, then the world's dominant surplus country, rebuffed calls for a mechanism that would impose pressure on both sides. Now the US is in the other camp.

Reactions to World Bank president Robert Zoellick's suggestion that gold might be used as part of a package of measures to reconstruct the international system ranged from the lukewarm to the bewildered.

European Union officials Wednesday were unable to mask their frustration with the downgrade of Greek debt by Standard & Poor's to junk status.

Europe will eventually grow tired of bailing out its weaker countries. The Germans will probably pull that plug first. The longer we wait to see fiscal probity established, at the European Central Bank and the European Union, and within each nation, the more debt will be built up, and the more dangerous the situation will get. When the plug is finally pulled, at least one nation will end up in a painful default; unfortunately, the way we are heading, the problems could be even more widespread.

Leaders from the euro zone countries signed off on a support package for Greece on Friday night and pledged to take steps to stanch a spreading debt crisis before markets opened on Monday morning.

La actual crisis del capitalismo global no es sólo económica. También lo es moral y jurídica. Por eso, las señales aparentes de recuperación económica son irrelevantes. No sólo por ser manipuladas y engañosas. Sino porque lo fundamental queda fuera. Y es que la crisis ha demostrado nuevamente que el ordenamiento jurídico de los estados no protege ni a los ciudadanos ni a los propios estados frente a la masiva destrucción de riqueza y bienestar que estos mercados pueden provocar y de hecho provocan.

The United States officials began talking to their counterparts about an American concept: overwhelming force. "It's all about psychology," said the senior official. "You have to convince people that the government will get its act together."

Like the giant financial bailout announced by the United States in 2008, the sweeping rescue package announced by Europe eased fears of a market collapse but left a big question: will it work long term? And as details crystallized of the package's main component - a promise by the European Union's member states to back 440 billion euros, or $560 billion, in new loans to bail out European economies - the wisdom of solving a debt crisis by taking on more debt was challenged by some analysts.

The pain of the European debt crisis is spreading, with the plummeting euro making Chinese companies less competitive in Europe, their largest market, and complicating any move to break the Chinese currency's peg to the dollar.

Political leaders and central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic struggled over the weekend to persuade jittery investors that Europe would pull through its sovereign debt crisis, saying that it would be helped by a stronger-than-expected economic recovery in the United States.

¿Por qué hay enormes déficits presupuestarios en todo el planeta? No es porque, de repente, todos los funcionarios del mundo se hayan convertido en apparatchiki de estilo soviético. Es, y por mucho, porque una economía global en declive ha llevado a menores ingresos y a un mayor gasto público en la red de seguridad social. El colmo de la ignorancia económica es proponer la destrucción de esa red de seguridad social a partir de una extrapolación de las equivocadas lecciones proporcionadas por los particularísimos problemas en que se ha metido a sí propia la eurozona.

Markets in the United States and Europe fell and the euro hit another low for the year on Thursday after the European Central Bank disappointed investors hoping for decisive action to contain the euro zone's increasingly virulent debt crisis.

On Wednesday, the government's partial ban on so-called naked short-selling took effect, as part of Berlin's effort to protect its biggest financial institutions and the euro currency from investors who have been betting against them.

Brimming with confidence, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio da Silva is raising his country's global status with increasing forays into international politics. In his most recent coup, he convinced Iran to agree to a controversial nuclear deal. Could it offer an opportunity to avoid both sanctions and war?

New global research on equality, inequality, and the happiness of nations. It's an American issue.

All this signals a clear shift in the development agenda. Traditionally, this was an agenda generated in the developed world that was implemented in - and, indeed, often imposed on - the developing world. The United States, Europe, and Japan will continue to be significant sources of economic resources and ideas, but the emerging markets are now entering this arena and will become significant players. Countries such as Brazil, China, India, and South Africa will be both donors and recipients of resources for development and of best practices for how to use them. A large portion of the world's poor live within their borders, yet they have achieved new respect on the global scene in economic, political, and intellectual terms. In fact, development has never been something that the rich bestowed on the poor but rather something the poor achieved for themselves. It appears that the Western powers are finally waking up to this truth in light of a financial crisis that, for them, is by no means over.

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

In the context of technology the only way out is through. Global society is dependent on artificially inflated energy resources-i.e. oil-that are directly leading us toward total collapse. Technology is being used to most efficiently maximize wealth of the largest corporate conglomerates at the expense of the social fabric and a living environment. The biosphere is in fact collapsing. The technology exists to solve our technical problems but the solutions do not seem like they will be effectively put to use. The power structures concentrating money off the status quo are too entrenched. Each human is called on to become more aware.