FIRST, the good news: China, the country at the centre of the debate about global imbalances, has a current-account surplus that has fallen sharply over the past few years. Now the bad: China was never really the prime culprit when it comes to imbalances at the global level. The biggest counterpart to America’s current-account deficit is the combined surplus of oil-exporting economies, which have enjoyed a huge windfall from high oil prices (see left-hand chart). This year the IMF expects them to run a record surplus of $740 billion,...

IF PROPERTY prices are a guide, Hong Kong is the most desirable place on Earth. Office rents, at some $160 per square foot a year, are now the world’s highest. New homes are also the dearest: one estimate puts prices 55% above those in London. The luxury real-estate arm of Christie’s, a British auction house, has just opened its first Asian outpost in the city. That is a bold move. Prices have surged by some 50% since early 2009, returning them to the level seen before Hong Kong’s last property crash in the late 1990s (see chart). Is...

ANDREW MELLON, Herbert Hoover’s treasury secretary, advised the president to “liquidate real estate” as part of a plan to “purge the rottenness out of the system”. Eighty years later, America has pretty much followed his advice. House prices have lost nearly all the real gains they notched up in the bubble period (see chart). That makes for a marked contrast with Europe, where prices may be off their peaks but have not lost all their real gains. Why the difference?

Many people think that owning a house is a certain moneymaker, but...

IN TAPACHULA, a furnace of a city in southern Mexico, people line up inside an air-conditioned branch of Banco Azteca to process their remittances. Last year Mexicans received an estimated $24 billion from friends and family working abroad, mainly in the United States, with which Mexico forms the world’s busiest remittance corridor (see map). But a closer look at the Tapachulan queue shows how the remittance business is changing. Many are not Mexicans receiving cash from America, but migrant workers sending it back home to Guatemala or Honduras....