By Martin Hutchinson, a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

It’s a great pity we didn’t close the IMF down in 2005-07, while we had the chance. It had such a small loan volume outstanding that it was running losses, with operating expenses being paid by depleting its capital. The central problem of the institution is that it represents yet another conduit by which resources are diverted from the productive private sector into propping up unproductive state entities. This reduces overall welfare, prevents the liquidation of malinvestment and is the principal reason why economic recovery from the 2008 recession has been so sluggish in the US and Europe.

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The November unemployment report showed that U.S. job creation is steady for now, but too slow to lower the unemployment rate. Job creation was weaker than prognosticators expected, but that was partly because of pre-holiday cautiousness in the retail sector. With no new fiscal stimulus, modest job creation is likely to continue — provided monetary largesse doesn’t undermine it.

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

One lesson from recent fat data dumps relates to fat tails. Both the Federal Reserve’s publication of data on its emergency credit facilities and the WikiLeaks releases of State Department messages could have caused market turmoil if they had been made public in real time. But some financial and political insiders were at least partly informed. It is a reminder that even supposedly efficient markets can’t reflect unknowns — and that information is always unevenly distributed.

The biggest secret to be revealed by WikiLeaks should have been the easiest to spot without the website’s classified document dump: American hegemony is on the wane. That underscores a heightened risk for global investors that without U.S. leadership, regional rivalries may turn nasty, trade barriers rise and fiscal policies destroy wealth.

It’s hard to avoid the overall impression from the disclosure of 250,000 secret State Department cables that the 1990s vision of U.S. supremacy and peaceful globalization is irrevocably ending. There are a number of risk-reducing advantages to the world in having a clearly defined hegemon, provided its intentions are reasonably benevolent.

Peru is a worthy borrower of very long-term debt. While poorer than Mexico or Goldman Sachs — two others recently in the market with long-dated bond issues — the Andean nation’s economy is more balanced, it has less debt and its growth prospects look better. Global mining companies already take the country seriously; its successful $2.5 billion financing this week suggests debt investors are coming to do so too.

Mexico recently sold 100-year debt at a 6.1 percent yield, while Goldman sold 50-year paper at 6.125 percent. In its fundraising, Peru’s long-term slug had a maturity of “only” 40 years, but it is still notable that the $1 billion issue sold at a lower yield than paid by Mexico or Goldman — 5.875 percent.

A proposal from the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, to use gold as a reference point could prove destabilizing. Like the Bretton Woods system, such a government-run peg would break under stress. A better approach would flip the monetary order and use gold as a private means of global exchange.

Zoellick suggests using the yellow metal as an “international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values.” In its weakest form, this would simply use the gold price as one indicator of the health of the global monetary system, something many central bankers already do. In a stronger form, it would mean fixing a peg for currencies in terms of gold, in a similar manner to the Bretton Woods monetary system in force from 1944 to 1971, and in vestigial form until 1973.

The newly empowered U.S. Republican Party may have fun kicking Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, around. Whether or not the party ends with control of the Senate, it will find budget cutting difficult and often unpopular. However as several regional Fed bank presidents — along with many Republicans — support tighter money it’s easy to see a GOP Congress making sport of harassing the central bank chairman.

With the White House still Democratic for at least the next two years, a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives may have difficulty scoring concrete achievements on the economic front.

The American economy is exhibiting an unhealthy zombie glow. Third-quarter GDP numbers, released just before the Halloween weekend, suggest worrisome imbalances rising again. The gain in real GDP was about equal to the growth in net imports and exceeded by the rise in inventories. Consumption was solid but government spending rose sharply as the savings rate fell. It’s not an altogether pretty picture.

In a well-balanced economy, consumption grows in tandem with overall GDP, with savings adequate to finance investment. Moreover, government spending growth is restrained, while inventories grow only as fast as consumption and the balance of payments deficit remains under control.