• Satayajit Das: A Call for Cooperation Among Key Finance Ministers

    Satyajit Das --global banking expert and author of several books on banking and trading, including Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk --says that the global economy is in for a lot of pain this year if policymakers don't start working together. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking 's Robert Johnson , Das argues that we need to return to the approach that finance ministers took in 2008-2009, when the consequence were clear and the need for cooperation was better understood. Here is an excerpt from that interview: Watch the full interview here .

  • The Street Poll on the Impact of Dubai Crisis

    The United Arab Emirates has "pledge[d] to lend money to banks operating in Dubai ," according to the New York Times , in an effort to prevent big disruptions on markets around the world after Dubai's announcement on Friday that the once-high-flying emirate needs to "reschedule" debt payments. The Street 's Eric Rosenbaum is now polling readers, asking who will be hit the hardest by the Dubai "sand trap," and he writes that the impact could be widespread: Big bank lenders to Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, including the Royal Bank of Scotland ( RBS Quote ) , HSBC ( HSBC Quote ) and Standard Chartered were throttled, as was the entire banking sector in the broad sell-off. However, the implications from the Dubai sand-trap could spread across many players, sectors and slices of the economy, and it's still anyone's guess as to the true significance of the debt crisis. There is already talk that the problems in Dubai could serve as an emerging-markets contagion, harkening back to Argentina in 2000 and Russia in the 1990s. Read the article and participate in the poll here .