C hina has signalled a change of approach to the Google crisis, with state media describing the company’s threat to pull out of the country as a political conspiracy by the US government. Accusations in two newspapers that Washington was using Google as a foreign policy tool were echoed by Chinese government officials on Wednesday.

Finally the doors are opening… The Wall Street elite have quietly kept a profit-exploding investment from everyday investors.

O il prices CL-FT tumbled Wednesday, weighed down by a drop on Wall Street, a stronger U.S. dollar and signs that China’s energy needs might not be as robust as previously thought.

G ary Rabbior is the president of the Canadian Foundation for Economic Education . This is the last of a six-part series on understanding how the economy works and why it matters to investors.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 12:07 PM BMO gets ready to roll out China, India, and junior gold ETFs Shirley Won T he Canadian supermarket for exchanged-traded funds (ETFs) is about to get even bigger. Bank of Montreal is expected as early as next week to launch a slew of specialty ETFs that will invest in emerging markets countries like China and India and sectors ranging from junior gold miners, utilities, infrastructure to the Nasdaq stock market. It looks like the bank is doing its best to make a dent quickly in the lion’s share of the market now held by iShares Canada ETFs

I t was a proper dressing-down for the boss from deepest China who had travelled to the capital to seek government help with overseas expansion. Vice-Premier Wang Qishan publicly interrogated the head of Sany Heavy Industry Ltd Co., a big engineering firm, about his management capabilities, asking if he was sensitive to cultural differences and the difficulty of dealing with unionized labour in the west. “If the other side’s engineers resign, are you really going to send people from Changsha overseas, and make the whole company speak Hunanese?” he asked, referring to the dialect spoken in Hunan, a province of nearly 70 million people whose capital is Changsha.

F or a country faced with huge fiscal problems, a possible downgrade in its debt rating and an election where no clear winner may emerge, Britain is getting a relatively easy ride from overseas investors. Britain’s major financial market assets – stocks, bonds and currency – are each being supported by external factors that could be masking the danger of a broader reversal. The suspicion is that more caution may be warranted