Michael Pettis is just cool. He writes cool stuff from Beijing (I think) that makes us think about the structures of the world. This time it's about trade imbalances, which I write about a lot, but not as well as this. I commend it to you because this is important. "Trade imbalances, of course, are the obverse of capital imbalances, and the surge in debt in peripheral Europe in the past decade – debt owed ultimately to Germany and the other core countries – was the inevitable consequence of those capital flow imbalances. While European policymakers alternatively sweat and shiver over fiscal deficits, surging government debt, and collapsing banks, there is almost no prospect of their resolving the European crisis until they address the divergence in costs. Of course if they don’t resolve this problem, the problem will be resolved for them in the form of a break-up of the euro."