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German perceptions of Mikhail Gorbachev are shown here in DW.com. He is revered in Germany because of Gorbachev's efforts to end Soviet rule in East German state called the GDR, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Gorbachev supported German reunification but did not do this is in a way that ensured that ordinary Russians and citizens of the GDR could make the transition to democratic processes in a smooth way. He also failed to grasp that economic transition could be difficult and would require extensive aid and grants from the west, and that safeguards and protections for retired pensioners and vulnerable sections of society needed to be in place. The following is a reflection of the background in political government and economy of the events in Europe leading to the war in Ukraine.  As a result Gorbachev's instincts were right by first 1956 as a student, and then 1979 as government official about the need for democratic processes to realize the real potential of Russia, just as has happened in many countries that lacked these processes for change in government- Japan, Germany, South Korea, India, Brazil and many countries in Asia and Latin America. But not realizing that these countries made the transition with considerable American and British assistance. Even where there was no direct assistance indirectly the British setup the first limited Swaraj or free rule in India, with elections and elected assemblies in Indian states in the 1930's, following the pattern in Dominion states Australia and Canada. Mohandas Gandhi negotiated within these processes for rights of South African Indians and Colored people, gaining experience, including study of British law.  A son of poor farmers in the agricultural region of North Caucasus, in Stavropol, it is relevant today that his maternal grand parents were from Chernihiv in Ukraine. He came to power in 1980 after entering the Politburo that year. These were the waning years of Leonid Brezhnev, president of the Soviet Union who followed Nikita Khrushchev (1953- 1964). Khrushchev was from eastern Ukrainian region near Donetsk. Leonid Brezhnev was a protege of Krushchev since 1931, from Kamianske, Ukraine.   Gorbachev was influenced by Khrushchev's speech that denounced Stalin in 1956 in favor of a freer and more open society. Khrushchev, became first secretary of the Communist party in 1953 after the death of Stalin and set the pace of post war Soviet society from 1950 to 1964. He removed the fear of the dictatorship of the proleteriat working class, increasingly dictatorial under Lenin, and blatantly arbitrary under his successor to make Soviet Union a freer society.  Yet his tendency to make decisions on his own without consulting others, and the failure of agriculture in the Soviet Union including food shortages led to his replacement by his protege Brezhnev. Brezhnev's whole career was built under Krushchev in Ukraine, in the army in Ukraine, and as a political leader in the Soviet 18th Army that entered Prague in 1945 defeating the Nazis. Why is this relevant? Gorbachev was educated at Moscow State University when the Soviet Union was in the Sputnik era, and felt at the time that it could reach the 1950's standard of living in the US- very different from the earlier leaders. Yet he may have been too much of an optimist and not hands on in understanding the working of a modern economy as large as Russia and the interests of different groups of society that had to be be balanced and protected. His understanding of the US and of how the US and British economies had evolved was limited or nonexistent. The isolation of the Soviet period may have compounded this. The Russian state in the Soviet Union could not simply unwind the power of the state and its intervention and everything would come out right of its own accord.   Leonid Brezhnev, the Ukrainian Russian who succeeded Krushchev from 1964 to 1979 let the system of Soviet rule remain as it was, in the Great Stagnation, leading to lethargy, lack of innovation, and a weak economy with military expansion. Gorbachev tried to regenerate the system by opening it up, but failed to see that there was a risk that it could come apart quickly as it did in just 4 years after he became president in 1985. Only the centralized power of the state had kept the Russian state together from the Tsarist period through the Communist period. The risks of this Gorbachev failed to grasp. What if it happened too quickly without a safety net for the people who could not make the transition. What lawlessness and failure of the rule of law could happen. The US and Britain had evolved their democracies over centuries. Wars were fought in the US and Britain over rights and responsibilities of kings and parliaments. In the US Lincoln fought the civil war not just for emancipation but to ensure safeguards for free white men on the farms so that Labor did not get disabilities placed on them by Capital (entrenched forces of Capital of which the southern plantation economy was only one aspect.)  Japan and Germany were set up as democratic states through American power and constitutional frameworks with Marshall Plans or agreement to take in unlimited imports from Japan. This bad scenario happened in Russia because Gorbachev failed to set the conditions first and work patiently to achieve them including introducing limited  elections and parliamentary processes first in Russia.  Leaders such as Yeltsin who succeeded Gorbachev in 1989, winning the elections that followed, failed to provide a safety net for the vulnerable in the 1980's. Unemployment increased rapidly, life expectancy dropped in Russia, and the economy failed in the early years after 1980. A Marshall Plan like that offered to Germany could have helped but Gorbachev's failure may have been his failure to provide this transition by arranging for West Germany and the US to support a planned transition, a kind of Marshall Plan of Aid, and maintaining a gradual move to democracy as the country was given time to learn institutions of American and British parliamentary democracy. No such Marshall Plan was negotiated for a smooth transition over inevitable obstacles, no safeguards were put in place for illegal efforts to control the state by rogue elements and to seize assets of state companies, no efforts to first introduce limited elections and parliamentary processes for learning democratic process in Russia, and the people of Russia were left with a memory of the this period as a bad lawless period from 1989 to 2005.  Leading to the situation today under Putin of aspiring to the Soviet period as a kind of period that had offered Russia the world recognition it had lost. And this had happened even though the Russian economy had recovered and the standard of living had risen under Putin. Putin's career spanned the period as a Russian official in Dresden, Germany Democratic Republic or Soviet period East Germany to working in the St Petersburg City Council under Yeltsin. He personally witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the German Democratic Republic from Dresden and Gorbachev's refusal to build a transition period for the changes so that it would not be traumatic for the GDR. Even after reunification these traumas remain in some segments of the older population in East Germany that saw themselves as neglected and support extreme right wing parties in eastern German states by 2020- considering the Soviet period as one in which their lives were less neglected.  After three terms as president Putin with his own traumas from that period in Dresden, and with a mother lost in the period after the Nazi invasion of Russia, a father who survived the Battle of Stalingrad, saw the period of lawless behaviour in the collapse of the Soviet Union as the"greatest geopolitical disaster of the century."  Putin and people around him made missteps and miscalculations launching a war in Ukraine, leading to the situation today- jeopardizing hard won gains for the Russian economy. By 2022 Russian standards of living had risen and the economy was in the best shape it had been in the modern period since the Industrial Revolution. Yet largely exposed because of the dependence on oil and gas during a period of climate change and focus on building future economies free of fossil fuels.  Putin in his own peculiar logic may have seen this as the only opportunity in 2022 before deliinking from fossil fuel reduced the importance of the Russian fuel dependent economy to make some territorial readjusments in Ukraine with a quick war taking Kviv. That turned into a massive miscalculation with the emergence of nationalist fervor in western Ukraine spreading to the whole country of 40 million people. In the future to 2030 with phasing out of the fossil fuel economy, Russia without the connections to the US and European Union's technology and resources it had during Putin's three terms, and facing strict sanctions from US and EU, faces a difficult future. This has cautionary lessons for all countries- the US that read too much into the fall of the Berlin wall and indulged in a losing proposition with free markets that damaged its infrastructure and manufacturing with shifts to China, China understanding of how it to was dependent on the world economy for its future development, India that had to navigate a difficult period and what lessons to draw for building a bigger economy, the EU realizing the failure of its policies of depending on Russia for energy and China for manufacturing with fragile supply chains,  and Russia that there were twists and turns and the need for safeguards and experience building democratic processes before these processes would work for the economy, its people and for Russia as a nation. ...

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Yan Xuetong, is professor of political science and dean of the Institute of Modern International Relations at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power. In this essay translated from the Chinese, Xuetong says China's new leaders should borrow ideas from ancient Chinese philosophers and theorists like Guanzi, Confucius, Xunzi and Mencius who pointed to the importance of morally informed leadership as the key to success in the long term. Xuetong presents this as the best way for China to compete with the U.S. At the same time it gives Xuetong a basis for calling on the new Chinese leadership to create a less unequal society, with attention paid to social justice and balanced development free from corruption, similiar to the calls made in the U.S.

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China's GDP growth accelerated slightly to 6.9 percent in the 1st quarter of 2017, after five consecutive quarters of GDP growth at 6.7-6.8%, according to government data. This reflected larger use of steel in the construction industry and more mortgages issued by the state controlled banking sector. Government officials say productivity is improving helping GDP growth, with closing of less efficient manufacturing plants. Industrial production increased 7.6% in March 2017, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The government is trying to control higher lending and reduce the backlog of bad loans at banks. Higher growth helps to reduce the bad loans at banks from the earlier period after 2008 financial crisis, improving financial stability.

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Concern about slowing growth in China with rising inflation. The problem of opaqueness of the financial system and of banks that are both listed companies and run by the government, and how this could accelerate a slowdown at some point with accumulated problems in the financial system. A sense that China's growth model has reached a limit, and whether there will be a soft landing.

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A shift in priorities away from focussing on high growth to lower sustainable growth was announced by China's premier Wen Jiabao at the National People's Congress, China's parliament, in March 2012. This shift will reduce investment in infrastructure, power generation and exports, which will affect the level of imports of commodities from commodity producing nations in the Middle East, Australia, Canada and Brazil. It should increase imports of software, computers, entertainment, tourism and high tech goods from the U.S. and Europe. Chinese leaders have said they would make this kind of shift for some years now but growth has consistently increased more than the target rate, and domestic consumption as a percentage of the economy has actually decreased in the last decade. Now 9-10% growth rates may be a thing of the past and the target of 7.5% set this year may be actually closer to the real figure. The Chinese leaders have belatedly realized the need to make these changes now because slowing markets in Europe -which is seeing declining growth and high unemployment- and in the U.S., make the issue impossible to avoid. Wen told the Congress: "Accelerating the transformation of the pattern of economc development... is both a long term task and our most pressing task at present... Domestically it has become more urgent but also more difficult... to alleviate the problem of unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable development." This is his way of saying that its unavoidable and better to start in earnest now, and at the same time recognizing the resistance to change from the stateowned companies and the other interests who have benefitted from surging growth, and now occupy a central role in the power structure. An opinion article in the People's Daily, China's official newspaper, said: "imperfect reforms are to be preferred to a crisis caused by no reforms." The World Bank's president Zoellick is respected by the Chinese leaders. He also urged them to make changes now. The recent report of the DRC, China's planning research arm, and the World Bank, also laid out the new direction away from a focus on infrastructure to domestic consumption. The fear is sudden deceleration in the absence of policy action. The impact of this will be negative for commodities over time, leading to slower growth in Australia, Brazil, and Canada. It should boost imports from Europe and the U.S. of high tech, consumer, pharmaceutical goods over time....

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A small tax on the $800 trillion foreign exchange industry of 0.005%- with the tax on currencies where the leaders of these countries approve like Merkel of Germany and Sarkozy of France- would generate much needed money to help the word's poorest, says Philippe Jouste-Blazy, a former foreign minister of France. For instance he says tuberculosis killed nearly 1.8 million people in 2007, and caused the GNP of some countries to fall as much as 7 %. THis would bring serious gains to economic growth in the poorest countries. Look at the $1 to $5 tax imposed on airline tickets in France and 10 other countries since 2005.It has raised $700 million and financed three quarters of the AIDS treatment now being received by the world's HIV positive children. Unitaid, is an organization Blazy leads. It manages the money from the airline tax, and has negotiated 50 to 60% reductions in the price of pediatric anti-retroviral drugs in low income countries. The reason why the banking community should support this tax. One it is tiny, 0.005% on a foreign exchange transaction, and should not affect the flow of transactions. It is done automatically by computer systems. The currency trading system right now is untaxed. More importantly the bankers says Blazy have been benficiaries of taxpayer money. Isn't it time to give back to those worst affected by the global crisis the bankers helped create? Does'nt it create more credibility for the global financial, monetary and trading systems? He says the tax money could be managed by the Global FUnd to fight AIDs Tuberculosis and Malaria, with upholds programs in 100 countries to high performance standards....

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A local government vehicle in China, Sixth Division of XPCC fails to make a bond payment in August 2018. This is the first such instance of failure to make a bond payment for a local government vehicle in 2018. Economists estimate China's total debt at 242% of GDP in 2017, and government efforts to tighten liquidity and reduce support for overextended local government investment vehicles.

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Huge inflows of capital into emerging markets because of low interest rates in the developed world, and the bubble effects this causes. Risks for emerging market countries as bubbles develop.

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Macroprudential policies of central banks in S. Korea, Indonesia, China, Canada, and other countries, as concerns grow about a housing and credit bubble.

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France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain agreed to have automatic exchange of information for offshore accounts to fight tax evasion. Luxembourg agreed to join this group. The EU nation move follows the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2010 which requires foreign banks and entities to disclose accounts of U.S. citizens, in an effort to fight tax evasion.

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Porter cites research by Andrew Berg and Jonathan Ostry of the IMF, which shows the strong connections between having a vibrant middle class, lower inequality and the sustainability of economic growth. In countries with higher inequality growth comes in spurts which fizzle out, and there are sharp contractions. Having good income distribution is important according to Berg and Ostry, if the process of economic growth is to be sustained. This logic is also supported by the need for a strong middle class for consumer spending, to provide the demand that supports growth.

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Local customs, tradition and history of development play a part in each region. This is the message from Islamist politicians who want to bridge the differences with the USA in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan. They want to keep some of their Islamic ways of life and still work with the US. These Islamic organizations are working to reduce the violence in the region and promote democratic discourse and electoral representation. This is happening amid widespread mistrust of the U.S. of all Islamist politicians. There are negative perceptions about things Western which are not automatically accepted in these highly tradition bound areas of Pakistan, especially the Afghanistan border regions. Some kind of rapprocement could bring peace to the region and cool growth of militants. Is there a basic misunderstanding of the area and are their other more gradual ways of bringing these areas into the mainstream. Of modernizing these societies over time so they gradually accept women's rights, education and development as opposed to the sudden onset of change. One sign - these areas need hospitals, they need roads and there is no disagreement about this. Once they see the benefits of development and militancy drops then it s easier for them to understand the benefits of schools for girls, women's rights, and education and all other development. Its like the American South trying to baccept negro rights after years of blatant racism, took some time but now some of the southern states can't even be recognized from what they used to be in their perception of black people....

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Moody's Investor's Service downgrades China's credit rating to A1 from Aa3. Moody's predicts a slowdown in growth for China. GDP growth for 1st quarter 2017 was 6.9%. Total debt has grown from 149% of gross domestic product in 2008, to 213% in 2013, and is now 253%, according to JP Morgan. The problem is that ever higher levels of credit have supported growth and more of this is coming from the shadow banking sector. Higher levels of debt in future years from the already high levels will weigh heavily on growth, leading to an eventual slowdown in the economy's growth rate.

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Friedman compares the anti-corruption movements in India and the U.S., the world's two largest democracies. The Occupy Wall Street anti-corruption movement in the U.S. focusses on the excessive influence of banks on lawmakers, regulators, and the government, through the use of campaign money, revolving door for government officials and regulators to join banks, and intense lobbying. The anti-corruption movement focusses on corruption in government at higher levels, such as the handling of government licenses, and at the basic levels of needing to bribe officials for something as simple as getting a birth certificate or other government document. Both have pernicious effects, in the U.S. excesssive bank influence leads to taking excessive risk for higher bonuses, putting the entire financial system at risk and creating a crisis in housing that delays the economic recovery. And in India the corruption leads to retarded progress, as funds to invest in infrastructure and development are siphoned off, business and entrepreneurs are required to pay bribes at each step, and ordinary people face the need to pay bribes for the most routine interactions with government officials. In the process this creates more unequal societies by skewing the distribution of benefits from wealth created to groups that are better equipped to game the system. The economic system once distorted in these ways has tendencies to take talent away from productive activity and innovation which create wealth, and direct it towards speculative activities....

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Efforts to boost the share of national income that goes to rural households and workers in China. The share of income taken by state owned enteprises and taxes paid by the enterprises would have to change for reducing the gap in incomes and reducing inequality in China.

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The Bank of International Settlements warns that China's "credit to GDP gap" is 30.1. A figure of 10 normally is considered to be high and needs watching. The People's Daily carried an article presumably by president Xi Jinping warning about the consequences of the debt that had been growing "like a tree in the air." The debt to GDP ratio was at 255% at the end of 2015, and is up 107% since 2008 when the financial crisis led to a huge stimulus that has accelerated debt growth. The corporate debt is at 171% of GDP. The article in the People's Daily warned about reflexive stimulus every time growth slows and said that China cannot any longer "force economic growth by levering up." Cross border liabilities is one area of progress falling by a third to $698 billion, as companies cut debt quickly before the U.S. Federal Reserve raises rates. In the future China is more likely to roll over debt as Japan had done following its debt surge and bad debt with zombie companies, which would in turn lead to lower growth. In the past the government was able to absorb the growing debt because it was not as high as it is today, and the economy was growing rapidly. This is no longer the situation, the reason for alarm at the situation facing China. A spike in interest rates of 250 basis points is cited as one situation which could affect China adversely. ...