The photos show five 11-meter-long Scuds at the Adra base. Three are on trucks in a car park. Two others are in a training area where 20 to 25 people can be made out along with about 20 vehicles. One of the two missiles appears to be mounted on a mobile launcher; another is on the ground.

In 2006, Hezbollah rocket fire into Israel precipitated Israeli air strikes and a ground invasion of Lebanon. Hezbollah's month-long barrage of rockets deeply unsettled Israel; with Scud missiles, Hezbollah can strike all the major cities in Israel.

In April, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Rai reported that Syrian President Bashar Assad was arming Hezbollah with Scuds, a report Assad denied but both the US and Israel later confirmed. Hezbollah sources told Al Rai that the group had the capability to launch 15 tons of explosives at Israel every day in the case of another war between the two sides, and went on to claim that Hezbollah possesses a wide range of missiles with a heavy payload, including the 1-ton Zilzal missile and half-ton Fateh 110 and M600 missiles.

Silver hit a 30-year peak to approach $24 an ounce, and the Reuters/Jefferies CRB index - a barometer for commodities - rose above 300 points for the first time in two years, as the dollar fell broadly on reinforced expectations of more US easing.

Axel Merk, portfolio manager of the Merk Hard Currency Fund, said that the Fed and other central banks are trying to weaken their currencies to boost economic growth, prompting investors to turn to gold as an alternative currency. "With the weaker dollar, inflation will pick up in the commodity space, which is the most sensitive to monetary stimulus. So, it's only logical that gold will do very well in that environment," said Merk, who manages $500 million in mutual fund assets.

The destructive trade and capital imbalances of the pre-crisis era are back, banking reform appears stuck in paralysing discord, public debt in many advanced economies remains firmly set on the road to ruin, and the spirit of international co-operation that saw nations come together to fight the crisis has largely disappeared.

This was not where we were meant to be in tackling the underlying causes of the crisis and returning the world to sustainable growth. Yet beneath this sense of frustration at lack of progress - and at international organisations such as the IMF and the G20 to bring it about - there is an underlying truth that's often left unspoken; many of the problems in the world economy right now are not international at all, but US specific and can only really be solved by America itself.

The Fed can act, by pouring more money into the economy (QE2), but the Hill is paralysed. A second fiscal stimulus of any size is blocked by political division. More monetary stimulus is all very well, but it's a blunt instrument which struggles to get through to the job creative bit of the economy - small and medium sized enterprises - and threatens new bubbles in emerging markets as abundant liquidity chases yield.

There's no political appetite or will in the US for the long term entitlement reform and tax increases necessary to bring the deficit under control. Nobody believes US Treasury forecasts that public debt will be stabilised by 2014. Much more believable are IMF estimates which see gross US debt rising to well in excess of 110 percent of GDP by 2015. The US has no strategy for the jobless and no strategy for rolling back debt. Little wonder that a renewed sense of gloom has settled on international policy makers.

Water levels were so low that at Guanlei, a river town not far from here, dozens of boats were laid up for more than three months. Alarmed at the drying up of the world's largest inland fishery, the four members of the Mekong River Commission - Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam - called a special summit.

"Without good and careful management of the Mekong river as well as its natural resources, this great river will not survive," Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva warned. The commission's political leaders suspected that China was hoarding water behind the dams it has built on the Mekong, exacerbating the impact of the drought.

China presented data to allay these fears. Finally, the rains returned and the tensions dissipated. But the incident highlighted the strains that are being generated as Asia's unslakeable thirst for water collides with the reality of a supply that is limited and, if climate change projections are borne out, may shrink sharply. The Asian Development Bank speaks of a looming crisis that threatens access to water and sanitation needs for millions of households and industries.

Thailand's cabinet agreed to impose a 15 percent withholding tax on capital gains and interest income from foreign investment in government debt in a bid to brake the baht, which has climbed to its highest level since the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Japan said it would wade into the foreign exchange market anew if need be to weaken the yen, despite widespread disapproval by its rich-country peers of a rare bout of dollar buying last month.

And Beijing once again talked down the prospects of a faster rise in the yuan, even as it acknowledged that more money would pour into China over the rest of the year in anticipation that the currency would strengthen. China's insistence that the yuan's rise must be gradual is a huge obstacle to the appreciation in Asian exchange rates that policymakers say are needed to help reduce global economic imbalances. Countries that compete with China fear losing business if they unilaterally let their currencies rise.

The tide of money is rising as markets anticipate that the Federal Reserve will crank up the money printing presses again next month to try to galvanize the stuttering US economy. A second round of quantitative easing by the US central government would aim primarily to lower long-term US interest rates, but it would also pile more pressure on the dollar, which is already languishing near a 15-year low against the yen.

The move comes amid recent allegations that mortgage-servicers, which include units of major banks such as Bank of America Corp, submitted fraudulent documents in thousands of foreclosure proceedings nationwide. The banks say the document problems are technical - largely the result of papers approved by so-called robo-signers with little review - and don't reflect substantive problems with foreclosures.

Still, they have drawn criticism from consumer advocates and state and federal lawmakers. "I think the mortgage-servicing firms need to understand that they face real exposure now, and they would be well advised to take this very seriously, to clean this up by doing loan workouts to keep people in their homes, which up till now they've just paid lip-service to," said Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray.

Against the Japanese currency, the dollar dropped to 81.39 yen - the lowest point since April 1995 and below the level which triggered Japanese government intervention in the foreign exchange market on September 15. International Monetary Fund policymakers failed on Saturday to reach a consensus on measures to head off what some see as a looming currency war but pledged to keep working toward easing global economic imbalances.

With economic recovery painfully slow, recent weeks have seen nations from Japan to Colombia intervene to stop their currencies from rising to levels that would make exports prohibitively expensive, sparking talk of a currency war. South Korea on Monday warned that failure to settle disputes about currency policy could fuel protectionism and damage the world economic recovery.

President Lee Myung-Bak, in a lunch with foreign correspondents before next month's Seoul G20 summit, urged members not to pursue only national interests. Analyst Brooks said the euro "may end up being the loser" of the currency war.

"The massive build-up of the foreign-exchange assets would only give more ammunition to those China critics who call for a rapid appreciation of the yuan," said Tom Orlik, a Beijing-based analyst for Stone & McCarthy Research Associates, who formerly worked for the UK Treasury.

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says a stronger yuan would stimulate demand in China, which replaced Japan in the second quarter as the world's second-largest economy. Inflows of cash threaten to worsen inflation and asset-bubble risks in the Chinese economy and central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said October 8 that the nation needs to avoid the "shock therapy" of excessive appreciation. China's currency reserves topped $2 trillion in the first half of last year.

Exchange rates dominated the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington amid concern that nations are relying on cheaper currencies to aid growth, risking trade wars. China was accused of undervaluing the yuan, while low interest rates in the US and other rich nations were blamed for flooding emerging markets with capital. Finance ministers and central bankers pledged to improve cooperation, yet did little to show how they would alter their ways beyond agreeing to let the IMF study the matter.

An IIF policy letter authored by Dallara and dated October 4 made clear that global currency coordination was needed, in the group's view, to prevent a looming currency war. "The narrowly focused unilateral and bilateral policy actions seen in recent months - including many proposed and actual measures on trade, currency intervention and monetary policy - have contributed to worsening underlying macroeconomic imbalances," Dallara wrote. "They have also led to growing protectionist pressures as countries scramble for export markets as a source of growth."

Dallard encouraged a return to the G-20 commitment to utilize International Monetary Fund special drawing rights to create an international one-world currency alternative to the US dollar as a new standard of foreign-exchange reserves.

Days before Mr Gates arrived in Asia, Commander Cao was aboard a frigate in the Yellow Sea, conducting China's first war games with the Australian Navy, exercises to which, he noted pointedly, the Americans were not invited. Nor are they likely to be, he told Australian journalists in slightly bent English, until "the United States stops selling the weapons to Taiwan and stopping spying us with the air or the surface."

The Pentagon is worried that its increasingly tense relationship with the Chinese military owes itself in part to the rising leaders of Commander Cao's generation, who, much more than the country's military elders, view the United States as the enemy. Older Chinese officers remember a time, before the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 set relations back, when American and Chinese forces made common cause against the Soviet Union.

The younger officers have known only an anti-American ideology, which casts the United States as bent on thwarting China's rise. "Why do you sell arms to Taiwan? We don't sell arms to Hawaii," said Colonel Liu Mingfu, a China National Defense University professor and author of "The China Dream," a nationalistic call to succeed the United States as the world's leading power.

Lenders across Europe and the US are facing a $4 trillion refinancing hurdle in the coming 24 months and many still need to recapitalise, the Washington-based organisation said in its Global Financial Stability Report. Governments will have to inject fresh equity into banks - particularly in Spain, Germany and the US - as well as prop up their funding structures by extending emergency support.

"Progress toward global financial stability has experienced a setback since April... [due to] the recent turmoil in sovereign debt markets," the IMF said. "The global financial system is still in a period of significant uncertainty and remains the Achilles' heel of the economic recovery."

Although the IMF does not mention individual countries, it is clear it has concerns about the UK. According to the Bank of England, British banks need to refinance 750-800 billion pounds of funding by the end of 2012, 285 billion pounds of which is emergency support that expires in the same period.

The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nuclear watchdog, has obtained satellite images showing that a row of cooling towers at Pakistan's secret Khushab-III reactor has been completed. This suggests the plant could begin operation within months, allowing Pakistan substantially to increase its stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium.

Last year, Barack Obama, US president, called for "a new treaty that verifiably ends the production of fissile materials". In response, the Conference on Disarmament, a 64-nation coalition that negotiated the 1992 Chemical Weapons convention and the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, agreed to negotiate a Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty, intended to cap production of weapons-grade enriched uranium and most forms of plutonium.

But Pakistan, which is deepening its nuclear ties to China, has blocked the Conference on Disarmament from starting discussions, saying a cut-off would hurt its national security interests. Ashley Tellis, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: "Pakistan thinks its going to be forced to cap its fissile material stocks and wants to make sure it has as much as it can get before then." The country's position has frustrated many states. Rose Gottmeiler, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, recently warned that her country's "patience is running out".

BDO also called on the Bank of England to pump more money into the economy. The Bank has already spent about 200 billion pounds on trying to boost the supply of money to stimulate the economy. There are growing calls for it to expand this quantitative easing programme, not least from Adam Posen, an external member of the monetary policy committee.

Some economists believe that more stimulus measures are needed to counteract the upcoming government spending cuts, designed to reduce the country's budget deficit. "We are worried that it is already beginning to look as if the government's growth figures don't stack up," said Peter Hemmington, partner at BDO.

"The balance of risks has clearly changed since the election and the chancellor would be wise to consider whether he can go slower than planned with [the spending] cuts." The Bank should inject another 50 billion pounds into the economy before the end of the year, Mr Hemmington added.

It is remarkable that mainstream media has given this speech no coverage. I repeat, the central banker of the United States says in his own words:

"Let me return to the issue of longer-term fiscal sustainability. As I have discussed, projections by the CBO and others show future budget deficits and debts rising indefinitely, and at increasing rates. To be sure, projections are to some degree only hypothetical exercises. Almost by definition, unsustainable trajectories of deficits and debts will never actually transpire, because creditors would never be willing to lend to a country in which the fiscal debt relative to the national income is rising without limit. Herbert Stein, a wise economist, once said, 'If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.'"

"One way or the other, fiscal adjustments sufficient to stabilize the federal budget will certainly occur at some point. The only real question is whether these adjustments will take place through a careful and deliberative process that weighs priorities and gives people plenty of time to adjust to changes in government programs or tax policies, or whether the needed fiscal adjustments will be a rapid and painful response to a looming or actual fiscal crisis."

This is as close as you are ever going to see a central banker admit that his country's financial situation is so dire that it could breakup at any time.

"We live in an amazing world. Everybody has big budget deficits and big easy money but somehow the world as a whole cannot fully employ itself," said former Fed chair Paul Volcker in Chris Whalen's new book Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream. "It is a serious question. We are no longer talking about a single country having a big depression but the entire world."

The US and Britain are debasing coinage to alleviate the pain of debt-busts, and to revive their export industries: China is debasing to off-load its manufacturing overcapacity on to the rest of the world, though it has a trade surplus with the US of $20 billion (12.6 billion pounds ) a month. Premier Wen Jiabao confesses that China's ability to maintain social order depends on a suppressed currency. A 20 percent revaluation would be unbearable. "I can't imagine how many Chinese factories will go bankrupt, how many Chinese workers will lose their jobs," he said.

Plead he might, but tempers in Washington are rising. Congress will vote next week on the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act, intended to make it much harder for the Commerce Department to avoid imposing "remedial tariffs" on Chinese goods deemed to be receiving "benefit" from an unduly weak currency. Brazil dived into the markets on Friday to weaken the real. The Swiss have been doing it for months, accumulating reserves equal to 40 percent of GDP in a forlorn attempt to stem capital flight from Euroland. Like the Chinese and Japanese, they too are battling to stop the rest of the world taking away their structural surplus.

The exception is Germany, which protects its surplus ($179 billion, or 5.2 percent of GDP) by means of an undervalued exchange rate within EMU. The global game of pass the unemployment parcel has to end somewhere. It ends in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, parts of Eastern Europe, and will end in France and Italy too, at least until their democracies object. We have a new world order where China and India are buying gold on every dip, where the West faces an ageing crisis, and where the sovereign states of the US, Japan, and most of Western Europe have public debt trajectories near or beyond the point of no return.

The managers of all four reserve currencies are playing fast and loose: the Fed is clipping the dollar; the Bank of England is clipping sterling; the European Central Bank is buying the bonds of EMU debtors to stave off insolvency, something it vowed never to do just months ago; and the Bank of Japan has just carried out two trillion yen of "unsterilized" intervention. Of course, gold can go higher.