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President Barack Obama has promised Asia's creditor nations that Washington will not let US borrowing spiral out of control, vowing a major drive to cut the budget deficit and restore global confidence in the US dollar. "As the economy recovers, I intend to take serious steps to reduce America's long-term deficit," he told the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum in Singapore. "Debt-driven growth cannot fuel America's long-term prosperity." The assurance comes amid growing doubts across the world over the wisdom of White House spending plans. The US Congressional Budget Office expects the deficit to remain around $1.8 trillion (£600bn) as...

Private credit is contracting on both sides of the Atlantic. The M3 money data is flashing early warning signals of a deflation crisis next year in nearly half the world economy. Emergency schemes that have propped up spending are being withdrawn, gently or otherwise. Unemployment benefits have masked social hardship unto now but these are starting to expire with cliff-edge effects.The jobless army in Spain will be reduced to €100 a week; in Estonia to €15. Whoever wins today's elections in Germany will face the reckoning so deftly dodged before. Kurzarbeit, that subsidises firms not to fire workers, is running...

The sun is setting on the US dollar as the ultra-loose monetary policy of the US Federal Reserve forces China and the vibrant economies of the emerging world to forge a new global currency order, according to a new report by HSBC. The dollar looks awfully like sterling after the First World War," said David Bloom, the bank's currency chief. Crucially, China and rising Asia have reached the point where they can no longer keep holding down their currencies to boost exports because this is causing mayhem to their own economies, stoking asset bubbles. Asia's "mercantilist mindset" of recent decades...

"The economic crisis has transformed the global economic landscape. The dreams of a decade ago now seem grandiose." Broadly speaking, the world is run at the outset of the 21st Century by the United States and China together in uneasy condominium. This is the surprising reality of our era. The pattern is unlikely to change much until India takes its full place, perhaps in 40 years. Strasbourg's Babel house has no unifying language or political culture The baton passed from Europe’s tired hands at London’s G20 summit in April, where the only meeting that mattered was the tete-a-tete between Barack...

Perma-bear Ambrose Evans-Pritchard seems to have stuck his nose out of his cave after a brief hibernation and determined that the world has gone mad with some “green shoots” fever. He works overtime this week trying to cure us of this malady. The first thing he does in his Telegraph article is throw cold water at us in the form of statistics: The elastic was bound to snap back, just as it did in the bear rally of early 1931. Whether the underlying economy has begun to heal is another matter.

Our delicious spring rally is nearing the limits. The 40pc rise on global bourses since March assumes that central banks have conjured away the debt overhang by slashing rates to zero and printing money. Nothing of the sort has occurred. Two thirds of the world economy will be in deflation by July. Bear market rallies can be explosive. Japan had four violent spikes during its Lost Decade (33pc, 55pc, 44pc, and 79pc). Wall Street had seven during the Great Depression, lasting 40 days on average. The spring of 1931 was a corker. James Montier at Société Générale said that even...

Factory output is collapsing at the fastest pace everywhere. The figures for the most recent month available are, year-on-year: Taiwan (-43pc), Ukraine (-34pc), Japan (-30pc), Singapore (-29pc), Hungary (-23pc), Sweden (-20pc), Korea (-19pc), Turkey (-18pc), Russia (-16pc), Spain (-15pc), Poland (-15pc), Brazil (-15pc), Italy (-14pc), Germany (-12pc), France (-11pc), US (-10pc) and Britain (-9pc). This terrifying fall has been concentrated in the last five months. The job slaughter has barely begun. By comparison, industrial output in core-Europe fell 2.8pc in 1930, 5.1pc in 1931 and 3.9pc in 1932, according to RBS. Stephen Lewis says we have been lulled into a...

Bad news: we're back to 1931. Good news: it's not 1933 yet Barack Obama inherits an economy already contracting at an annual rate of 6pc, much like the mid-Depression year of 1931 (-6.4pc), writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Last Updated: 8:38AM GMT 26 Jan 2009 Comments 11 | Comment on this article This may beat Germany (-7pc) Japan (-12pc) and Korea (-22pc) over the fourth quarter. But that merely underlines the dangers ahead as the collapse of global trade chokes the mini-boom in US exports, setting off another stage of the crisis. The US is losing 500,000 jobs a...

Asia is not going to rescue the world economy. The news from Japan, China, and the Pacific tigers has moved from awful to calamitous since the global industrial system snapped in October. A raw reality is being laid bare. The mercantilist export model of the East is proving dangerously geared to the debt-driven excesses of the West. As we go down, they go down too. Some are going down even harder. Japan's industrial output contracted by 16.2pc in November, year-on-year. "For an economy which lives from the prowess of its industrial exports, this is simply earthquake," said Edward Hugh from...

Financial crisis: Ireland’s banks are rescued Ireland has launched a full-scale rescue of its financial system, issuing a state guarantee worth €400bn (£316bn) to cover the key liabilities of its biggest banks and mortgage lenders. By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Last Updated: 6:45AM BST 01 Oct 2008 It is the most dramatic and comprehensive bank bail-out in Europe since the Scandinavian rescues of the early 1990s and may serve as a model for Britain and other countries that so far have been muddling through from one mishap to another with a mish-mash of ad hoc policies. The state guarantee exceeds 200pc of...

An almighty crash has been averted, very narrowly. There is no guarantee that the revolutionary actions of the US government will prevent a full-fledged global slump, but at least we now have a fighting chance. By taking the colossal wreckage of the credit bubble onto its own books in a $700bn (£382bn) taxpayer sink, Washington has forestalled a run on the world banking system, and may hopefully have saved the viable core of modern capitalism. * * * We will find out soon enough whether the rest of the world can respond with such dispatch as the hurricane smashes into...

Europe's monetary union may be tested to near breaking point as the economic downturn engulfs the bloc's southern tier, and German investors cut off a crucial source of foreign funding, according a hard-hitting report by the Swiss bank UBS. "The coming two years are likely to prove the most testing time for the coherence of the single currency to date," said Meyrick Chapman, the bank's Europe strategist. "We expect that it will emerge unbroken. There is too much political and economic capital invested to break the project. However, adjustments are likely to be severe," he said. UBS warned of a...

The Federal Reserve's rescue has failed By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor Last Updated: 11:10am GMT 03/03/2008 Have your say Read comments The verdict is in. The Fed's emergency rate cuts in January have failed to halt the downward spiral towards a full-blown debt deflation. Much more drastic action will be needed. Read more from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard 'Ninja' loans explode on sub-prime frontline Yields on two-year US Treasuries plummeted to 1.63pc on Friday in a flight to safety, foretelling financial winter. advertisement The debt markets are freezing ever deeper, a full eight months into the crunch. Contagion is spreading into...

Bears beware. The New Deal of 2008 is in the works. The US Treasury is about to shower households with rebate cheques to head off a full-blown slump, and save the Bush presidency. On Friday, Mr Bush convened the so-called Plunge Protection Team for its first known meeting in the Oval Office. The black arts unit - officially the President's Working Group on Financial Markets - was created after the 1987 crash. It appears to have powers to support the markets in a crisis with a host of instruments, mostly by through buying futures contracts on the stock indexes (DOW,...

Britain could be expelled from the European Union if it refuses to accept a fully-fledged European government with powers to launch military or police actions on British soil, according to a draft constitution unveiled by Brussels yesterday.Any government which accepted this would be immediately disposed of by the electorate - Ivan The new proposals, secretly drawn up by Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, call for the total abolition of the national veto to prevent policy paralysis after the arrival of 10 new states in 2004. Utter confusion reigned in Brussels yesterday after Mr Prodi astounded his own top lieutenants...

Disregard all hysteria. The ailing Greenback will not collapse this year, not in ten years, not in twenty years, not in half a century. There is no credible currency against which it can collapse. (Unless you count gold). None of the world's rival power blocs have the economic and demographic depth to challenge American dominance.

If you are a bear, you must accept that you will always be wrong in polite society, and you will continue to be wrong all the way down to the bottom of recession. That is the cross that bears must bear. Night sky It's gone, whatever sceptical colleagues may say Over the last three months we have seen a rolling collapse of speculative debt and real estate across half the global economy, yet friends still come over to my desk at the Telegraph, with that maddening look of commiseration on their faces, and jab: “so when is the sky going...

Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor Last Updated: 7:29pm BST 19/09/2007 Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East. "This is a very dangerous situation for the dollar," said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas. "Saudi Arabia has $800bn (£400bn) in their future generation fund, and the entire region...

Greenspan was more a rock star than a feared Fed sage By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Last Updated: 1:08am BST 18/09/2007 We forget now, but Alan Greenspan first rose in Washington as a political aide to Richard Nixon - not as an economist. Greenspan warns of UK house prices drop Comment: More rock star than feared Fed sage In depth: Alan Greenspan As domestic policy boss for Nixon's 1968 campaign, he wrote the speech calling for an end to the Vietnam draft - the mischievous pledge that clinched a tight race. Greenspan slashed rates to mitigate the dotcom debacle His mentor was...

British withdrawal from the EU is coming into sharper focus, with all the grave consequences that will ensue for the Atlantic order and the cause of market liberalism. For this we can thank those who recklessly - or mischievously - chose to revive the European Constitution after rejection by the French and Dutch people, when common sense urged Brussels to lie low, lick its wounds, and rediscover patience. By reopening this can of worms, they have already let France's Nicolas Sarkozy excise the clause "free and undistorted competition" from the core objectives of the Union. Adieu to the single market,...