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from Global Investing:
Time to kick Russia out of the BRICs?
It may end up sounding like a famous ball-point pen maker, but an argument is being made that Goldman Sach's famous marketing device, the BRICs, should really be the BICs. Does Russia really deserve to be a BRIC, asks Anders Åslund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an article for Foreign Policy.
Åslund, who is also co-author with Andrew Kuchins of "The Russian Balance Sheet", reckons the Russia of 
Putin and Medvedev is just not worthy of inclusion alongside Brazil, India and China in the list of blue-chip economic powerhouses. He writes:
The country's economic performance has plummeted to such a dismal level that one must ask whether it is entitled to have any say at all on the global economy, compared with the other, more functional members of its cohort.
I have just returned from Moscow, which is always dreary around this season. But this year, the mood among the capital's eloquent liberal economists has hit a new low. For the last seven years, Russia has undertaken no significant economic reforms. Instead, the state has been living off oil and gas, like a lucky but undeserving rentier."
from Global Investing:
Bear market rally/Bull market beginning?
Another month and another Reuters asset allocation poll. This time saw investors in United States, Europe and Japan lifting their equity holdings and cutting back slightly on bonds. Fits with what has been happening on global financial markets, where MSCI's main world stock index is heading for its best month in at least six years.
So the big question is what happens now. Is this a bear market bounce that will soon dissipate? Or is it the start of something bullish that will last?
from Global Investing:
Dead cat bounce?
New year can get in the way of understanding what is happening on financial markets. Just because 
humans measure the year in 12 month tranches, it does not necessarily follow that markets do. Consider world stocks, for example. MSCI's all-country world stock index is often cited as having fallen 43.5 percent in 2008. In fact, long-term investors' losses were a lot worse. From an all-time high on November 1, 2007, to a low on November 28, 2008, the index fell 56.2 percent.
Something similar is happening at the moment. Investors might be focusing on year-to-date losses of around 5.7 percent for the index, but they are doing better than that. The index has gained 14.5 percent from that November 28 low last year.
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