The unemployment in March kept increasing, now reaching a 25-year high of 663,000 jobs lost.  There are 5.1 million Americans unemployed. The yen is weakening, which is good for the export-oriented Japanese economy, but not so good for out trade balance. Paul Krugman writes today about China's Catch-22: it bought massive amounts of dollars to keep its own currency undervalued and now it has... vast... amounts.... of dollars.  Seventy percent of the assets China has accumulated are dollar-denominated.  If the dollar falls, so will the value of Chinese investments.  And they can't do anything about it now, because if they start getting rid of those assets preemptively, they will trigger the fall of the dollar. Krugman says, China wants to pretend it's going to be "business as usual," as long as the U.S. shapes up already.  But the economic party has been shut down by the global recession, and it is unlikely we will ever get back to the world, in which China can finance its own development at everybody else's expense.