Events, particularly these days, tend to outrun the best laid plans to anticipate research trends. And it might seem that this was true in the case of this conference, sponsored by UCSC's Santa Cruz Center for International Economics, the Journal of International Money and Finance, and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The conference was planned last year, at a time when most academic researchers were aware and concerned about the incipient economic slowdown, and whether the major economies would "de-couple", and in turn how these factors would impact the constellation of global imbalances.

As it turns out, the papers were all, in my opinion, remarkably germane to issues we're concerned about right now: how the composition of debt determines vulnerability to crises, the effect of capital controls on capital flows, the role of the IMF, and the usefulness of macroeconometric models to predict exchange

World stocks edge up… Crude oil falls, trades just above $51 a barrel… U.S. dollar firmer, U.S. bonds rise

U.S. stocks were mostly higher in thin trade on Friday, as investors eyed retail sales on the first day of the shopping season after the Thanksgiving Day holiday, to gauge the extent of weakening consumer demand.

European and Asian shares were also higher, despite the attacks in Mumbai, India, while U.S. Treasury debt prices and the U.S. dollar both gained as investors continued to look for safe-havens as global economic growth slows.

“It’s a light volume day so you’re going to see some choppy trading, with so many people out,” said Robert Finkel, consumer trader at Stifel Nicolaus in Baltimore of the U.S. stock market.

“I’m watching how things go from a retail standpoint today - we’ve heard a lot of speculation about how bad it’s going to