The 2009 Failed States Index has just been released, a fifth annual collaboration between Foreign Policy Magazine and the Fund for Peace, ranking 177 countries according to a range of economic, political and social indicators. Considering the ease with which some people tend to throw this term around, I am compelled to open the discussion here with some attempt at agreeing on just what it means for a state to be "failed". Robert I. Rotberg, director of the Kennedy School of Government's program on intrastate conflict and conflict resolution and president of the World Peace Foundation, offers this summary of what qualifies:

"Failed states have two defining criteria: They deliver very low quantities and qualities of

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Behold the “negative basis trade,” per John Dizard: “You can own a corporate bond, or emerging market sovereign bond, buy default protection on the paper with CDS, and collect interest payments for taking no risk. That’s right: because CDS prices are depressed, relative to the comparable bonds, you can collect money for taking no risk.” Per Riccardo Barbieri of BofA-Merrill Lynch, “as long as [oil] prices rise only moderately from here – say, revisiting the $80 a barrel level by year-end, this would not pose severe risks for the advanced economies, while the emerging ones would be able to tolerate even higher levels, say, $100, in due course.” David Pilling notes that “Vietnamese exports have been fairly resilient. While economies such as Singapore and Taiwan have seen declines of 30 or 40 per cent in shipments, Vietnam was down a modest 3.7 per cent in the first ...