Here's what Iran's president had to say at a summit of the Central Asia's 10-nation Economic Cooperation Organization:

"After the collapse of the closed socialist economy, the capitalist economy is also on the verge of collapse," Ahmadinejad said in a speech.

"The liberal economy and the free market have failed," he said, pointing to the use of "thousands of billions of dollars" to bail out Western banks and companies.

Ahmadinejad proposed a single currency for the region to facilitate trade, though I'm not sure if even he'd go as far as Kazakh President (and fellow ECO member) Nursultan Nazarbayev's global "acmetalism" idea. The ECO definitely seems like a contender for the world's most outside-the-box regional trade federation.

Creative financing schemes and frisky credit-risk assessments haven't only catapulted capitalist economies to the brink. For years China's state-run banks have relied upon a coterie of dubious experts and shady loan guarantee companies when extending credit. Now, as things fall apart, Forbes' Gady Epstein finds he can't get his calls returned -- these phantom financial wizards have lately taken a turn for the reclusive -- but still manages to lift the veil on China's consequential credit underground.

 

Whether or not banks elsewhere are nationalized, the real issue remains whether financial planners know what they're doing. Tim Geithner, take note.

On the other hand, per Forbes, at least credit is still available in China:

"In America, basically, private capital has dried up, but in China you have these large pools of capital sitting around," says Anne Stevenson-Yang, principal of Wedge MKI, an investment research and advisory firm in Beijing. "The problem is that most of the short-term capital and capital for private companies is in these gray and sometimes semicriminal networks."

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As part of an overall package of regulations, European leaders pledged to crack down on tax havens over the weekend. “We want results on this, with a list of tax havens and a series of consequences,” said French President Nicolas Sarkozy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who's had tax havens in her crosshairs for a while, stressed the need to eliminate "“blind spots on the global map when it comes to financial-market products, market participants and instruments.”

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is preparing a new "black list" of uncooperative tax havens such as Andorra, Monaco, and Liechtenstein. Controversially, several finance ministers are calling for Switzerland to be added to the list. Swiss bank UBS made a historic break with past practice last week by agreeing to divulge the names of 250 customers to the U.S. Justice Department as part of a tax evasion investigation. U.S. authorities are still seeking the identities of 52,000 UBS customers.

With even Swiss banks giving in to investigators, is the era of offshore accounts coming to an end? It's hard to have too much sympathy for fat cats exploiting legal grey areas to avoid the taxes that the rest of us have to pay, but last March, Cato's Daniel Mitchell made the case for why a tax haven crackdown should actually worry us:

First, if you live in a developed country, your taxes are probably much lower today than they were 30 years ago, thanks in part to tax havens. [...] Governments are cutting taxes because they fear that jobs and investment will flee across national borders. Tax havens, by providing a safe refuge for people seeking to dodge confiscatory tax rates, have played a critical role in these positive developments. Better to get some revenue with modest tax rates, lawmakers have concluded, than impose high tax rates and lose out.

Second, European duchies and Caribbean isles aren’t the only places that welcome tax refugees. The United States, for instance, could be considered the world’s largest tax haven. The U.S. government generally does not tax interest and capital gains received by foreigners who invest in America. And since the IRS does not collect data on those payments, there is rarely any information to share with foreign tax collectors. Moreover, U.S. corporate structures, such as Delaware and Nevada companies, are excellent vehicles for foreigners to manage their investments. Thanks in part to these attractive policies, foreigners today have more than $12 trillion invested in the United States. Yet if Merkel’s efforts are successful and all nations are saddled with the obligation to help enforce foreign tax laws, it is quite likely that a substantial share of that job-creating capital will flee the United States.

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Considering that their states are still technically at war, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso got along remarkably well during their summit meeting in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on Wednesday. While palling around on Sakhalin Island at the opening of a new $22 billion LNG plant (the first such plant in Russia), Aso and Medvedev praised the economic cooperation that has helped Russia and Japan strengthen their relationship over the past ten years.

Annual trade has now reached $30 billion, tripling in size since 2004. The first phase of the massively expensive ESPO pipeline, connecting oil reserves in Siberia with Russia's Pacific coast, has been completed and the construction of phase two has been announced. This is rare good news for two economies that have been hit particularly hard by the global financial crisis.

But it's still not all smiles between the two countries. The violent reaction of Vladivostok's workers to the imposition of a tariff on Japanese vehicles in late December displays the importance of Japanese commerce to Russia's remote Far East provinces. More seriously,a Japanese ship carrying ¥12.8 million worth of medical aid at the request of Russian residents on the disputed Kuril Islands was turned away in January because the Japanese delegation refused to show disembarkation cards, a move that the Japanese consider tantamount to recognizing Russian sovereignty over the Kurils. T

The Japanese claim that the Kuril islands -currently under Russian control - are historically Japanese and were seized illegally by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. The dispute over the islands has prevented Russia and Japan from signing a peace treaty and officially ending the war.

Until the Kuril issue is resolved, Japan and Russia will continue to be in the contradictory position of building ever closer ties while still officially fighting World War II.

NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

Should we count Euroskepticism among the victims of the financial crisis?

The Czech Republic's lower house of parliament approved the EU's controversial Lisbon Treaty today in a major victory for the plan to streamline the body's decision-making process. Assuming the upper house passes the measure, that will leave Germany, Poland and Ireland as the only countries yet to ratify Lisbon.

Ireland, the only country to require a public referendum for ratification, is the biggest stumbling block. Irish voters rejected the treaty last June, but the political landscape seems to have changed in the post-crisis world:

Czech approval came as new polls showed public opinion swinging behind the treaty in Ireland, raising the prospect that Irish voters will reverse last year’s 53.4 percent to 46.6 percent veto. A second vote -- if held now -- would yield a majority of 58 percent in favor of the accord, a poll for the Sunday Business Post found on Feb. 1.

The pressing need for unified European action to address the crisis seems to have trumped fears about national sovereignty. The Irish government is now looking to hold a new referendum as soon as possible.

In retrospect, however, country's stubbornness seems to have paid off. The EU has been forced to make a number of concessions to placate Irish voters:

The Irish government agreed to put the Lisbon Treaty to a second referendum by November 2009, in return for a set of EU "legal guarantees" aimed at addressing various concerns raised by voters. The EU pledges not to impose rules on Ireland concerning taxation, "family" issues - such as abortion, euthanasia and gay marriage - and the traditional Irish state neutrality.

Announcing the new Lisbon deal, French President Nicolas Sarkozy also said that under Lisbon "every member state will have a commissioner" - another concession to Ireland.That promise might prove difficult to reconcile with the original plan under Lisbon to have fewer commissioners than member states, as from 2014.

Through sheer obstinateness, the Irish seem to have made themselves the most powerful constituency in the EU. Sometimes it pays to be difficult.

MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/Getty Images