COMMENT: "The challenges of managing our post-crisis world," by Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 30 December 2009.

Starts out by talking about his Jewish past and how families on both sides lost damn near everybody in the Holocaust. As such, he defends his strong focus on averting a rerun of the Great Depression last year, saying the world basically succeeded in this effort. But what are the big tasks ahead? 1) dealing with the balance-sheet recession still ongoing in Old Core West 2) dealing with reality that we substituted public-sector borrowing for the private-sector version in the recovery 3) tackling the still highly imbalanced global trade flows whereupon China, Japan and Germany mostly export and the rest of the Core mostly imports. 4) pushing surplus countries toward needed policy changes, like China's pegged currency, and 5) still working the financial system that contains plenty of toxic assets. Thus the need to avoid complacency at this juncture. Naturally, I always listen closely when Wolf speaks.