Figures published Wednesday on China's economy show the country doing worse than the World Bank previously anticipated, boding poorly for China's chances of avoiding the global downturn as well as for the West's hopes of possible bailout assistance from Asia. 

Martin Walker argues that the precipitous fall of the British pound, which has lost a quarter of its value since the summer and is now at historic lows against the dollar, will not, as European Commission President Jose Barroso and others have speculated, nudge the UK into the Eurozone.

The rise in attractiveness of “State Capitalism” development models is cited as a potential consequence of the increasing economic power of Russia and particularly China in the latest report from the National Intelligence Council,  Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World.

Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Atlantic Council's board of directors, published "A Dagger in the Heart of Indian Commerce" in Barron's today.

The full text is provided below as a courtesy to Council members.

In its latest report entitled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, the National Intelligence Council has made various predictions about the continuing and changing influence of globalization around the world. It is argued that “as some countries become more invested in their economic well-being, incentives toward geopolitical stability could increase.” This is positive.

Will this weekend's G20 summit really be "Bretton Woods II?"  The answer from Europe (like the U.S.) seems to be no. 

Tomorrow, leaders of the top industrialized countries and the key emerging economies that make up the G20 will meet in Washington for a Global Economic Summit. This meeting is a critical first step towards international coordination in addressing the current financial crisis.

Oil prices have plummeted in recent weeks, hitting a 20-month low of $59 per barrel, a 60 percent drop-off from its summer high of $147.  One might reasonably think that this would be crippling to a country like Russia, which relies so heavily on energy exports to stake its claim to major power status. 

The Troika Dialog team, though, argues that it's much more complicated than that.

As almost everyone now agrees, recovery from what promises to be a protracted global recession will require a multilateral effort.   In an increasingly interconnected world, the politics of mutualism, as I have written elsewhere, will force developed as well as emerging countries to rely on each other.

Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, told an Atlantic Council audience earlier today that the global financial crisis has  "re-emphasized the centrality of the U.S. dollar as a currency" and demonstrated once again that "when things go really badly lots of people want go to the U.S. even if U.S. is why, even in part, things are going so badly."