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What's the most important factor affecting Scottish business in recent days?

The downbeat assessment of economic recovery from Fraser of Allander?
Lloyds TSB Scotland on the market? Mediocre growth in retail sales?

Think again, and look to Asia, where President Obama has been on his travels.

His visit to Beijing did not look an easy one, as the world's two superpowers eye each other warily in trying to find their places in the new world order.

Reckless money

Earlier this year, they found common cause in throwing huge fiscal stimuli into the worst of the crisis.

But now, it is the areas of tension that are of more significance.
Three areas to watch:

• The Chinese are not open about the scale of their foreign reserves, but they're in the $2.3 trillion range. Most of that is held in US dollar assets, and a large chunk in US government bonds
• The Chinese concern is that its investment could be undermined by reckless fiscal expansion and money creation, and the temptation in Washington to let inflation reduce the cost of servicing its debt
• The US concern is that the Chinese remain reluctant to let their currency float. While it remains pegged to the weak dollar, the yuan puts Chinese exporters at a cost advantage. That means China is exporting problems into its trading partners' domestic industries - most immediately those of its Asian neighbours.

If they can't find solutions to these twin problems, one solution with potentially more painful consequences is for America to introduce trade barriers. They recently stepped up the pressure, with big tariffs on tyres and steel pipes.

Currency pressures

Whether China is reckless in undervaluing the yuan, or the US is the guilty party for its fiscal and monetary stances, the danger is of a new set of global imbalances. And as the current recession owes much to the Chinese saving too much and the Americans (and British) building up too much debt, new varieties of global imbalance are not welcome.

One of those imbalances comes from low interest rates in the US and other countries, including the UK. The carry trade, in which speculators borrow at low rates (in US dollars, for instance) and invest in assets denominated at higher rates, is causing growing concern.

It is seen as encouraging unwelcome upward currency pressures on countries such as Brazil and South Africa. The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, offers evidence that the fear of an asset bubble may be overstated, at least insofar as the debt burden is being reduced.

But the economists at Strathclyde University's Fraser of Allander Institute put a new globalised asset bubble of precisely that type among the most prominent concerns facing the Scottish economy.

Malawi's miracle

While I'm scanning international horizons... many Scots take an interest in the special relationship with Malawi - going back 150 years and recently revived.

It's not a country often associated with things going right. But that may be changing.

So it's worth a read of Nils Blythe's report on the , which even sees the southern African country exporting food.