Back in 2000 the Onion saw it coming; foreign aid has become largely privatized in recent years:

Private philanthropy is 50 percent greater than government assistance, and remittances are twice as great as private philanthropy. Religious organizations give about a third as much as the entire U.S. government.

However, this privatization may not come as much of a surprise if you have been following the story of remittances over the last few years. It’s a topic that will certainly gain more traction in the near term as various groups seek ways to capitalize, direct and invest these financial flows in productive projects in migrant-sending regions.

Last week I discussed how mobile phones were being used by people in developing economies. Here is a link to a discussion of another study done on the same topic, in this case in Kerala, India:

… the power the middleman holds over the fishermen due to the monopoly on price information has lessened somewhat. The free flow of information ensures the fishermen get the opportunity to drive a harder bargain than before.

Which sort of circles back to whether or not fishermen or other commodity producers have access to the same information via radio or similar communications technology.
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More cell phones, better grain prices. This is a fairly important aspect of how mobile technology enables producers in developing countries to get a better deal for their products. And it makes perfect sense. I have also heard about this in relation to fish, and other commodities. In some, the fishermen in that case can check if the price is high enough to warrant them going out that day and potentially avoid lost productivity.

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Not that rethinking free trade is anything new - economists and social scientists have always found a variety of different angles from which to examine the issues linked to free trade.

What will be different now is that we will be hearing more about this rethinking in the news, Businessweek’s article “Economists Rethink Free Trade” marking a sort of turning point in current thought:

But something momentous is happening inside the church of free trade: Doubts are creeping in. We’re not talking wholesale, dramatic repudiation of the theory. Economists are, however, noting that their ideas can’t explain the disturbing stagnation in income that much of the middle class is experiencing. They also fear a protectionist backlash unless more is done to help those who are losing out. “Previously, you just had extremists making extravagant claims against trade,” says Gary C. Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Now there are broader questions being raised that would not have been asked 10 or 15 years ago.”

While I do understand how free trade does provide benefits in the aggregate by leveraging the power of comparative advantage, the economic models we use do not necessarily capture the nuance of the real world.
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So the other day I referred briefly to the new idea of decoupling. It never really gained any traction with me, and to be truthful I am not really sure how it gained traction with anybody.

How would it be possible to have a global, integrated economy and trading network where effects do not propagate. One might say that if there are multiple strong economies the failure of one might be mitigated by the others. As it is, the Asian and European markets are suffering from the changing fortunes of their American partners. This should not at all be unexpected. In fact, it is a classic social contagion problem.
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Troubling news from the world financial markets(US markets are closed today in observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday) as stock prices decline on fears of United States recession. The New York Times points out that:

The angst about the United States belies the popular theory that Europe and Asia are not as dependent on the American economy as they once were, in part because they trade more with each other. The theory, known as decoupling, has been used to explain why economies like China and Germany have kept growing robustly, even as the United States has slowed.

Emphasizing the fact that despite the strong growth of Asian economies in the past decade, United States can still exert a powerful economic pull on those nations. The global market seems to persist as officials from the European Central Bank have also questioned the idea that the world’s major markets have “decoupled”, making them less subject to the recent downturn in American fortunes.
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The current weakness of the US dollar vs. the Euro is a well-discussed topic - everyone is trying to figure out what the abandonment of the dollar as the primary world currecy would mean.

Andrew Sullivan notes that rapper and mogul Jay-Z is counting his stacks in Euros these days.

But, maybe a weak dollar could be good news from rappers, as I think we can safely assume that United States is the biggest exporter of rap, and with a weak dollar there should be a corresponding increase in demand for the music, yo.