Riz! What are you doing here!

Riz! What are you doing here!

I’ve just bumped into Riz Khan and his producer in the corridor here at al Jazeera English’s headquarters in Times Square.

They’re here in New York doing a show about China, asking the question will the giant country soon take-over from the U.S. as the world’s biggest economy?

Among the topics: China’s overseas investments in North America and Africa; its one trillion dollar stake in U.S. debt and piracy issues.

The answer to the question, by the way, seems to be that while it’s still very early for China to catch up with the U.S. twenty years from now all that may have changed.

You can catch Riz talking China on the Channel throughout the next twenty four hours Weds/Thurs.

On Wall Street the Dow Jones Industrial Average gave up a one hundred point rally to close down 52 points as once again financial stocks fell out of bed!

So is there an economic recovery in progress or not?

The answer seems to be that while things aren’t getting worse, they’re certainly not getting better.

Look at bank stocks for example - they led the post-March NY stock market rally for two reasons.

1. CitiGroup and Bank of America and others turned in strong profits in the first business quarter.

2. The bank stress tests devised by the Obama economic team revealed than none of the 19 biggest banks examined is likely to become insolvent.

On the strength of that the New York markets have been up approx 30% since March as investors learned to look forward rather than dwelling on crisis woes.

The trouble is each time a piece of data comes out that might adversely affect the banks the markets lose confidence and close lower.

That’s what’s been happening this week.

There were two other stories of interest on Wednesday …

C Robert Kidder has been announced as the new man in charge of Chrysler if the take-over of the auto maker by Fiat of Italy goes ahead.

And look at the price of a barrel of crude oil! $62.04 is a new multi-month high.

It’s happening because if the recovery is real the assumption is that demand will increase.

Remember there’s only so much black gold to go round and sooner or later prices will start nudging the $100 a barrel mark again.

That’s a pity because to most Americans lower prices at the pump have been the equivalent of a one percent basic rate tax cut - more to some people - and that’s money they’ve been using  just to get by.

- John