In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

The slower traders began issuing buy orders. But rather than being shown to all potential sellers at the same time, some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds — 0.03 seconds — in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.

By wildly overstating its claims on many countries, the US has undermined its credibility and confirmed criticisms that the report lacks reliability or objective analysis.

The American consumer has for decades served as the engine of world commerce, using borrowed cash to snap up the accouterments of modern living [...] Eliminate the American wherewithal to shop, and the pain would ripple out to multiple shores.

Some political scientists, such as Azar Gat of Tel Aviv University, who coined the phrase "authoritarian capitalism" to describe the trend, see these countries as the first major threat to the idea of free-market democracy since fascism and communism.

Tent cities have sprung up outside Los Angeles as people lose their homes in the mortgage crisis.

For the first time since World War II the United States is not the world's #1 economy. We have slipped behind the European Union. (This, according to Erin Burnett on CNBC, Friday, March 14th.)

We offer online merchants a secure payment system with no fixed fees and zero start-up costs that will yield dramatically increased profit margins.

China holds over one trillion dollars, and Japan almost one trillion, in dollar-denominated assets.

Other countries have lesser but still substantial amounts. As the US dollar is the reserve currency, the entire world’s investment portfolio is over-wei