We're not big fans of the fund management industry at MoneyWeek. Too many products charge huge fees, often for doing nothing more complicated than tracking a market index as closely as possible.

If it's a market tracker you want, you might as well pay as little as possible for it. That's why we like exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which have much lower costs than 'actively' managed funds.

The press never misses a chance to dance on the greenback's grave these days. So the news that China's holdings of gold had almost doubled got a lot of coverage last week.

At first glance, this looks like proof that unhappiness with America's profligate ways is finally boiling over. China is preparing to dump the dollar and switch into something a little more durable. Or so the story went.

'The bigger they come, the harder they fall' is not supposed to apply to economies. As a country gets richer, it's supposed to be less prone to boom and bust, to twisting in every passing trade wind. So what do we make of Japan?

After all, this is the world's second-largest economy and one of the richest and most advanced countries in the world. Yet Japanese GDP fell at an annualised rate of 12.1% in the last quarter of 2008. January to March 2009 is likely to be as bad. In comparison, the 6.2% plunge in US GDP at the end of last year looks very mild.

Indian elections are democracy on an epic scale. Once every five years, over half a billion people get to choose their government. From the time the first vote goes into the ballot box to the last takes four weeks. It's by a long way the world's biggest poll – and each time it gets larger as India's electorate grows.

With this year's election kicking off in mid-April, the ruling Congress coalition is doing its best to talk up India's prospects and secure its re-election. The economy will grow by 7.1% in the year to April, says the government. Next year, it should manage 6%.

Spring is often said to be the best season to be in Shanghai, sandwiched as it is between a winter of near-Siberian winds and a hot, humid summer. And as far as investors are concerned, it seems to have come early this year.

“Structural versus cyclical” is the new "decoupling". Over the last couple of weeks, I've talked to a few fund managers and read several trees' worth of analysts' predictions for 2009 – and that phrase has been jumping out at me again and again.

The argument is simple. America, Britain and the rest of the over-consuming West have a serious structural problem. They've lived beyond their means for too long. Now they need to cut back and repair their battered balance sheets.

In this crisis, as in Japan's long recession, the problem is not that banks won't lend, but that companies won't borrow. So what to do? Cris Heaton reports.

What is a balance-sheet recession?

In a healthy economy, businesses borrow to invest in new capacity, households save, and the government alternates between borrowing and saving, depending on the point in the cycle. But if firms are no longer borrowing, a gap emerges in the economy. The money they would have borrowed piles up unused in the banks. The effect of this money falling out of circulation creates severe deflation – less money chasing the same quantity of goods means lower prices. This is well-established – for example, the Great Depression saw a 47% collapse in bank lending between 1929 and 1933. The usual explanation is that banks were refusing to lend, but Nomura economist Richard Koo argues in his new book, The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics, that the real problem was that businesses were unwilling to borrow. He calls this a 'balance-sheet recession'. That may sound like a technicality, but it has huge implications for trying to avoid a depression.

Is Eastern Europe doing well?

It has been. Shaking off the shackles of communism and then joining the European Union has helped many Eastern European countries expand at a spectacular pace. GDP growth of 5% or more has been common and wages have risen even faster – by up to 30% in Latvia last year. That, combined with easy access to credit, has encouraged consumers to spend, spend, spend: domestic demand, together with foreign investment, has been a bigger engine of growth than exports.

Can the good times last?

No. Over reliance on credit and consumer spending to drive growth has resulted in enormous current-account deficits building up – Latvia’s peaked at 28.2% of gross domestic product [GDP] and Estonia’s at 22.9% – as countries have imported far more than they exported. Public finances aren’t in great shape either: Hungary ran a budget deficit of 5.8% of GDP last year.