"The spread of anti-filesharing measures across the United States and Europe appears to be accelerating at a somewhat dizzying pace. On an almost daily basis during the last few months stories about controversial and sometimes draconian measures to deal with online infringement have hit the headlines.

Say what you like about the big movie and music studios – they certainly know how to coordinate their lobbying to perfection. Timing like this, with legislation being mulled in many major markets simultaneously, sends a powerful message."

"Where does this all leave us? The rest of the world is intent on pursuing a begger thy neighbor strategy, with the US being the neighbor. I suspect US policymakers will eventually relent; it will be the only choice left. All we can do now is sit back and wait for the inevitable explosion in the US trade deficit, waiting idly by for the next crisis and the "chance" to bring some sanity to the global financial architecture."

"So when France and Germany make sure that Greece can pay its debt, they are also rescuing, well, France and Germany. Also makes it clear exactly how contagion could work in practice."

"Keeping tabs on the thematic redundancy with which the United States government has marketed its calls for regime change over the years would appear to be a responsible activity for American citizens, given the fact that our nation has its imperial tentacles wrapped all over the planet. But I have never seen a "Remember Panama" sign at a protest, and, as I have confessed, until a few weeks ago, I would not have known what such a sign meant. Whenever Panama is discussed in the media, it is in order to advise Americans to go there and spoil their unspoiled beaches (hence, my initial interest in the country)."

"Unless we want to keep America from moving up the value chain, we will have less manufacturing.

True enough, especially since China consolidated a lot of lower-end manufacturing from a lot of neighboring Asian states, becoming the final assembler of note.

The opposing school of thought says we must retain our industrial base or lose our fundamentals--as it were.

But here's the trick with the manufacturing lobby: many produce in China as well as the U.S."

"This piece nicely argues that it's not the loss in income that matters to most Americans (we can adjust) but the loss of certainty. We can always belt-tighten and money only makes you so happy (no rise in happiness above $20k per capita per year--the world over), but this sense that we don't know what's coming next in the economy is truly paralyzing."

"Private equity and venture capital to major countries has slowed or fallen in recent quarters, although the long term still looks promising. Ajay Shah, a senior fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, calls India a “pre-modern market economy” that lacks a well-integrated bond market and other financial infrastructure to move money quickly into the system. Large conglomerates such as Tata and other Top 100 firms in India “will tap into all types of cash you’ve never heard of,” he says. But other companies –- especially family-run firms that lack diverse products –- cannot find debt capital and are being pounded by “unprecedented negative shocks to cash flow.”"

"In a much-discussed magazine article last year, Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, raised an important question: Why does the rest of the world view China’s rise as a threat but India’s as a wonderful success story? The answer is that India is a vast, unwieldy, open democracy ruled by a coalition of 20 parties. It is evolving through a daily flow of ideas among the conservative forces of caste and religion, the liberals who dominate intellectual life, and the new forces of global capitalism."

"It is important to keep in mind that cartoon extremes often cloud the debate. How smart is it to advocate open trade when some countries stack the deck by having artificially cheap currencies? That is tantamount to an export subsidy, but we haven't done much except jawbone China very late in the game (and the yen has been awfully cheap until recently too, and Japan has remained an export powerhouse, but we never gave them a hard time due to the sorry state of their domestic economy). Similarly, we consider it completely reasonable to restrict exports of advanced military technology, and acquisition of strategic assets. "

"As always, the question will be: What new rules and rule-setting venues emerge? Because eventually they must. The Asian Flu didn't do it, nor have any of the other more regional shocks since, but eventually you need some entities to emerge to monitor and manage these cross-border financial flows. This gap has been clear for many years, but as long as informal collusion among the largest economies has worked--just well enough--no one's been willing to surrender the power. Maybe this perturbation, then, is really the one.

That's how you need to view this global churn in a grand strategic sense: the opportunity to fill in profound rule-set gaps generated by all this rising connectivity."