SINGAPORE – The talk was about global rebalancing. U.S. President Barack Obama arrived in Asia on his first official tour, talking about a "rare inflection point in history". A time where "we have the opportunity to take a different path." A chance to rebalance the model where Asia consumers consume more and US exporters export more.

Chinese President Hu Jintao was among world leaders at the APEC summit in Singapore.

APEC leaders fully endorsed the strategy; virtually every economy in the world does. But look inside the APEC meeting in Singapore, and see the problems of turning this into reality. One of the biggest may be China.

More than two years ago, China began to allow its currency to appreciate against the dollar. By the time the financial crisis exploded, it had risen in value by about 20 percent. The crisis was the signal for China to freeze the exchange rate there at about 6.83 to the US dollar.

That was a year ago. Even China's Asian trade partners are now worried that the Chinese yuan is undervalued against the sinking dollar. So one of the key issues in Singapore was to put subtle pressure on China to unfreeze its currency.

Finance ministers talked about flexible exchange rates, the APEC leaders were expected to talk to about "market oriented" exchange rates - all aimed at prodding China to become a little more "market oriented" in its own exchange rates.

But by the end of the gathering, all reference to market-oriented exchange rates in the final statement from leaders had been erased. There had been debate behind closed doors between the U.S. and China about the statement. In the end China appears to have won out.

The message seem to be China will move only when its ready. And for all its newfound goodwill and push for re-engagement, there's not much the U.S. can do about that.

Singapore – Alphabet soup is on the menu everywhere here at the APEC summit. Acronyms, painful at the best of times, seem to be used continually by leaders, CEOs and politicians gathered in Singapore. Here’s a guide for those trying to follow the action.

APEC

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, consists of 21 member economies that account for more than half of global gross domestic product – the value of all goods and services a country produces. Members include power players such as the United States, Japan and China and developing nations such as Chile and Indonesia. A key part of the mission: achieving the 'Bogor Goals of “free and open trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific by 2010 for industrialized economies and 2020 for developing economies.”

 Once famously described as"four adjectives looking for a noun,” APEC sometimes comes under criticism for being little more than a talking shop. Members have no treaty obligations and all agreements are non-binding. Still any event that puts Barack Obama and Hu Jintao in the same room is going to attract the world’s attention.

 ASEAN

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN has 10 member states, with a combined GDP of US$1.5 trillion. The group’s mission is to promote economic growth and regional stability. Barack Obama will be the first U.S. president to meet with the group’s leaders, including Myanmar’s Prime Minister Thein Sein. The Obama administration has adopted a policy of engaging Myanmar, also known as Burma, in hopes it will push the country toward democratic reforms.

 TPP

Until a few days ago, the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP was little known economic alliance formed between Chile, New Zealand, Singapore and Brunei. Now the U.S., Australia, Peru and Vietnam want to join, with the intention of using the TPP as a stepping stone toward the ultimate goal of free trade throughout the APEC region. This may be the first you have heard of TPP, but I doubt it will be the last.

Singapore – The dirty secret of events such as the APEC CEO Summit is that they are usually scripted, bloodless affairs where any "news" is typically of the tightly choreographed variety.

Exxon Mobil’s Tillerson: Can science predict what will happen with climate change?

So it was a welcome relief that the last session, devoted to the theme "The Shape of Things to Come," bucked that trend. The always provocative Kishore Mahbubani, author of "The New Asian Hemisphere," asked the panelists to speculate on an improbable version of the future.

Rex W. Tillerson, chairman and CEO of the Exxon Mobil Corp., talked at length about the harsh realities of creating and deploying new technologies for the world's growing hunger for energy. For his implausible vision of the future, he offered the following.

"Today, climate change issues so dominates energy policy… the implausible future may be climate change effects don't turn out the way we thought they would, that the climate models simply aren’t competent enough to predict the future.

"Perhaps the Earth has naturally occurring forces that bring it back into equilibrium, and the consequences don’t manifest themselves.

"Or alternatively, perhaps, none of the things we do to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions make any difference, that there are other factors in the climate system that are going to force a change to a warming planet regardless of what we do, which means the glaciers are still going to melt, sea levels are still going to rise, weather patterns are still going to shift."

That prompted a strong reaction from U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

"I cannot accept the notion or find it implausible that we as human beings have no control over our destiny and that global warming is a natural phenomenon … or that it will suddenly reverse itself," he said.

"I find it implausible and I think unacceptable that we as human beings should simply do nothing about it or have no ability to control our destiny."

Perhaps Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, summed up an unlikely future best: "The most improbable scenario that I could ever imagine... is what we've been through over the last year," he said.

"If you told anyone what we were about to go through the past year, they would have told you you're nuts.

"So we have lived through an improbable year and we must learn the lessons of this extraordinarily difficult period so that we never, ever have to go through it again."

Gary Locke may be the top commerce official in America, but he's a rock star in China.

Locke was a hit with locals on a recent visit to China.

This week, the Chinese-American politician who is now U.S. Commerce Secretary, visited cities in the manufacturing heartland of China ahead of his high-level trade talks in Hangzhou.

Locke is joined by U.S. officials such as Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Trade Representative Ron Kirk, and Ambassador Jon Huntsman, who are here meeting with top Chinese officials including Vice Premier Wang Qishan.

I managed to catch up with Locke in Guangzhou, the capital of the province of Guangdong, where his grandfather was born. You would have thought Locke was a celebrity. During his tour of a Sam's Club superstore and a local university, Locke was mobbed by fans, press, and curious on-lookers all eager to catch a glimpse of their hometown hero.

Locke's grandfather lived in a village in this part of China before leaving for the United States in the hope of a better life. Grandfather Locke emigrated to Washington state where he took a job as a servant for a local family who lived one mile away from the Governor's Mansion. I wonder if Grandfather Locke ever dreamed his grandson would be serving people as well - as governor and now commerce secretary.

Locke told me his personal story is "thoroughly American" but that his Chinese heritage comes in handy in trade negotiations here. "I bring, perhaps, a greater understanding of the culture and history of the Chinese people," he said during our exclusive interview.

These days, the U.S. and China could use a little more understanding. Because of the economic crisis, the bond between the two trading partners has been stretched.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration slapped tariffs on Chinese tires sold in the U.S. Soon after, the Chinese threatened to cut off imports of American poultry products and auto parts.

Locke played down fears of a coming trade war. "When you look at the relationship of say brothers and sisters, the relationship when you are small and young might be very simplistic. But as the families get older they get into more complicated issues," he explained. "But it is the sign of a healthy relationship."

Locke insists the trade disputes won't distract the two nations from cooperating on larger issues such as climate change or regional security. However, even before Secretary Locke has left China, Beijing has informed Washington it is launching a trade investigation that could lead to new import duties on vehicles made by Detroit's struggling Big Three automakers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler), according to a U.S. auto industry official.

Hopefully, Locke's experience bridging two cultures will help bridge any economic split.

Five years ago, Garuda Indonesia was an airline that seemed to be on a path of constant turbulence. It was losing money year after year, battling allegations of corruption within the state-owned enterprise and stained with a questionable safety record. Today, Garuda is a symbol of what's possible in the difficult airline industry. You need a leader with focus.

Emirsyah Satar, 50, is the CEO of Garuda. Now in his fifth year as the head of the national airline, he has turned Garuda from problematic to profitable through staged planning. “In the first two years, just surviving was good enough. And then the next two years was the turnaround stage,” he said. Now the airline is embarking on the growth stage.

The son of an Indonesian diplomat who grew up in Mexico City and Prague, Satar went on to become a banker and then the CEO of Bank Danamon, Indonesia's fifth largest bank. In 2005, he was brought to Garuda as President and CEO and he made drastic changes from the start.

"What happened in 2005, the business model was just not working,” Satar said. It increased accountability at all levels in the organization. And in the short term, Satar decided less was more: “We got out of routes where we were losing money … it was ok if we reduced our market so we could become profitable again."

He positioned Garuda as a “premium airline” and told his staff not to worry about local competition. With a domestic population of 240 million people, he bet focus on the cream of the crop would keep Garuda afloat while it restructured. His bet paid off, in part because Indonesia sidestepped the brunt of the global downturn thanks to the strength of its domestic market: Indonesia's economy is still growing at around 4 percent.

While Garuda is still juggling $700 million in debt, the state-owned enterprise has been able to turn a profit the past two years. Satar has plans to make what he calls a "quantum leap."  By 2014, he wants to bring the fleet from the current 66 to 116 aircraft.

The big challenge now is getting a stalled IPO back on track. Satar had wanted to bring Garuda public this year, but the global downturn put a halt to that. Now he's shooting for an IPO for June 2010. The airline is also in the process of restructuring its debt, which Satar hopes to have completed by the end of this month.

Then there was the issue of safety. In the past decade, a string of crashes involving various Indonesian airlines eroded the public trust in Indonesian air safety. In March 2007, a Garuda plane overshot a runway in Yogyakarta and crashed, killing 21 people. In June 2007, the European Union banned all Indonesian airlines in European airspace. Satar hired an American consultant and and cracked down on safety issues. In July of this year, the EU lifted the ban on certain airlines included Garuda.

The airline now plans to get into the long-haul market, starting with an Indonesia-Amsterdam route by June 2010. That will be followed by routes to Frankfurt, London, Paris, Rome and eventually in 2012, Los Angeles.

"We (Garuda) travel to Australia, Japan, Korea, China and these people still travel. And Bali is still a good attraction," Satar said.

The first thing that took me by surprise about my interview with Madhu Kannan, the CEO of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) was the timing of our chat. “Can you be here by 8.25 am?” he asked. Sure, I replied and cameraman, Sanjiv, and I reached his plush office right on time.

It had taken around 3 months and an endless number of emails and phone calls to the BSE’s press office to confirm a date and time for our interview. It was frustrating to keep chasing them – I put it down to Indian bureaucracy and poor time management, unfortunately still typical of many large Indian companies.

“That’s one thing I am trying to change,” said Kannan when we interviewed him. “I want to start meetings on time and change the culture so no one’s late for meetings.”

It’s just one of the many, many challenges Kannan has ahead of him.

His big task: To revamp the BSE and make it relevant again.

At 37, he’s the youngest CEO of Asia’s oldest stock exchange. It’s an exchange that needs help.

While it had a virtual monopoly over stock trading in India, the entry of a rival exchange – the National Stock Exchange in the early 1990’s – changed that. The BSE now handles only a fraction of all trading done in India. To compete more efficiently, it needs to invest in better technology, says Kannan, who also has plans to make the BSE a one-stop shop for investors looking to trade across multiple platforms.

Sure, Kannan may get the BSE back on its feet. However, the real challenge for any stock exchange in India – be it the BSE or the NSE  – is to get more people to invest in stocks. Only a tiny fraction –two percent of India’s billion strong population – dabbles in the share market. Those in rural areas still prefer to invest in tangible assets like gold.

Even if Kannan is able to win back customers who’ve switched to the NSE, convincing newcomers to try their hand at trading shares, say observers, could be key to the BSE’s success. Given the robust year the Indian stock market has had, it could well attract a bunch of new investors.

Kannan has already started the process of repositioning the BSE. He’s in the process of buying a technology firm, has cut transaction fees, and – oh yes – he starts all his meetings on time.

You know how it is –- you’re in a strange city, maybe a strange country, tired, hungry, missing home, it's kind of late. You walk into that little (in my case, Chinese restaurant), there are teeth marks on the chopsticks, the floor is kind of sticky, and on the menu is the house specialty: rabbit face. Not quite what you wanted, but as luck would have it, just down the road you can see it in the distance – the golden arches, sitting high and proud calling to you.

OK, this might be (in my case) China, but you know that somehow, once you walk through those doors, there on the menu will be a cheeseburger, a Big Mac, Quarter Pounder and fries. And for the most part the food will taste pretty much like the Mickey Dee’s on Santa Monica not far from my old apartment in LA.

So, when I buy my Big Mac here in China, it’s just over 12 RMB, or $1.76. When I buy a Big Mac in L.A. it costs around $3.50. The great thing about a Big Mac as far as economists are concerned (wel, the ones at “The Economist” magazine, anyway) is that it's pretty much the same wherever you go . . . two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.

And that means for economists it’s a great way to compare currencies. Much like the Big Mac itself, it’s not perfect – wages, rents and other costs vary, as well as the size (I have noticed the Chinese burgers a little on the small side). But for more than 20 years the people at “The Economist” have been doing this exchange rate comparison, and – surprise, surprise – they found Asian currencies under-valued, European over-valued.

In the case of China, by about 40 percent undervalued – this is at the far end of the spectrum as far as many critics in the U.S. are concerned. They accuse Beijing of deliberately manipulating the currency, keeping it undervalued. That means exports from China are a lot cheaper, giving exporters here an unfair competitive advantage, they claim.

Imagine if you could go to that McDonald’s in L.A. and instead of paying $3.50 or so for the American Big Mac, you could pay $1.76 for the Chinese version, knowing the ingredients are the same.

HONG KONG, China - "Asia's astonishing rebound", says the front cover in today's edition of The Economist newspaper (yes, they call it a newspaper). It is astonishing, too, when you look at the headline economic numbers coming out of the region at the moment.

Asia’s steady rise: Can it continue without consumers in the U.S. and Europe increasing their spending?

Take second-quarter economic growth for example: China up 7.9 percent, Hong Kong up 3.3 percent, South Korea up 2.3 percent, and even poor, lumbering out-of-shape Japan is expected to break its 18-month recession on Monday with Q2 growth of 1 percent. In Europe, recession is ending, too. But look at the numbers. Germany and France can manage growth of just 0.3 percent in the second quarter; Britain and Spain are still in recession.

Why? Why are these export-driven Asian economies leading the global recovery, when their key markets are still only now just stirring after the knockdown punch of the global crisis of late last year?

In a word: stimulus. It's not just China's $585 billion funneling into the economy; it's also Japan's $150 billion, and South Korea and Hong Kong's $11 billion apiece. Tax breaks, enormous investment projects, and government-funded property incentives all helped to keep the Asian consumer afloat, and generate economic growth. Restocking in the United States and Europe also helped, as companies broke from their deep-freeze and started building up inventories.

But. ... and there is a big one here: In its current form it's not sustainable. Asian policy-makers have done a remarkable job lifting economic growth out of the gutter, but until the real engines of global growth get off the ropes, the Asian rebound isn’t going to go anywhere.

What's needed is strong, sustained demand from consumers in the U.S., Europe AND Asia. It's starting in Asia, but this is still an export-focused region.

Glenn Maguire, chief economist at Soc-Gen, says it will be decades before Asian economies have rebalanced so that domestic demand can keep economies growth healthy by itself. And here's a clear statistic to back that up: Maguire says the U.S. consumer market in 2007 was about $10 trillion. China, by contrast, was $1 trillion. Even taking into account the rest of Asia (except Japan) but including India it comes to about $2 trillion. Some other estimates put the total at $4 trillion, but you can see Asia is still a long way behind.

It's a given that the U.S. consumer has changed his/her buying habits. Job security and rock-bottom home values and big, big personal debts will do that. It will be a long time, perhaps many years if ever, before the U.S. consumer, or for the matter the European consumer, is prepared to go on the sort of buying binge we've seen build up during the past two decades.

That means lower economic growth, for all of us, for a long time to come.

It seems one of the biggest challenges in covering the Stern Hu/Rio Tinto case is trying to explain how the Chinese legal system works, or doesn’t work. For a start everything is in Chinese, which may seem pretty obvious, but it makes it pretty tricky; there are translation issues, which starts to get really tough when you include legal terms, as well.

China says the Rio Tinto case will not affect the development of ties with Australia.

On Wednesday came word that the “Rio Four” - as they’ve being called by some in Australia - had been “arrested.” This was the cause for a great deal of confusion in our newsroom – hadn’t they already been arrested? Didn’t that already happen when police swooped in last month? How can someone be arrested by police without being arrested?

And this is perhaps why the Stern Hu case is causing such nervousness among so many of my highly-paid, still-employed, executive friends in Beijing. A number of lawyers who have nothing to do with the Rio case explained to me how it works. Unlike other countries such as the U.S., Britain and Australia, in China police have the power to detain those suspected of being up to no good. They can do that for 37 days. No arrest, no charges, nothing.

So you sit in a jail for 37 days, 888 hours, wondering what it is you’ve done (or if you know, wondering how they found out and what evidence they have). By day 38, police must decide to either formally arrest you or let you go. In the Rio case, they went ahead with the arrests. The police have another two months to gather evidence, can apply for an extension of a month, and then if they need to, another two months and another two months. That’s a total of seven months. All the time you are in a jail, wondering what is going on.

If there is good news here for Mr. Hu and the three others it is that they’ve been arrested on charges of illegally obtaining commercial secrets, not state secrets. Lawyers told me those are likely to be the charges they’ll face in court if it goes that far.

There’s always a slim chance that illegally obtaining state secrets could get back into the mix (legally it’s possible and politically anything is possible, as well.) But there does seem to be a sniff of maybe a deal in the works. China is backing away from the most serious allegations, the heat is coming out of the relationship a little. China’s Deputy Commerce Minister, Fu Ziying, said Wednesday he believed “this case should not, and will not, affect the stable development of the economic and trade bilateral ties between China and Australia."

And a source of mine in Canberra tells me a Chinese embassy car has been parked in front of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for most of the early afternoon.

Coincidence? Maybe, but four Rio employees sitting in a Shanghai prison will no doubt be hoping it’s not.

JAKARTA, Indonesia – Noke Kiroyan enjoyed attending the regular CastleAsia business breakfast at the Marriott in Jakarta. It was a good place to network, and he liked the attentive service: The waiter always remembered his preferred simple breakfast of two eggs.

Security is always an issue in Jakarta. Everyone knows that the country’s most notorious terrorist, Noordin Top, is still at large and has a long track record of bombing hotels, embassies and nightclubs. But the Marriott seemed a secure location – bags were checked and everyone passed through a metal detector upon entry. Last Friday, the Indonesian and expatriate executives gathering there felt no cause for alarm.

But as Noke – a Jakarta business consultant and former CEO of several multinational companies in Indonesia – chatted with fellow business leaders at breakfast, two suicide bombers were making their last checks in room 1808. One descended in the elevator and walked straight toward the lounge where the Castle Asia meeting was taking place. A more obvious target might have been the busy coffee shop nearby, but the bomber had his eyes fixed on the lounge, as he wheeled a suitcase packed full of explosives.

What happened next Noke will never forget: a loud bang, a red flash and then darkness. He regained consciousness, unsure if he was dead or alive. He saw nothing, the void pierced only by the groans and prayers of the others around him. Then as the dust settled, he saw a beam of light. He stumbled towards it. Staff grabbed him and helped him out onto the sidewalk, where he saw a friend from the meeting who’d also escaped.

A brief thumbs-up and a few words in Dutch confirmed they were both okay. But others weren’t so lucky. Three Australians and a New Zealander were among the victims, as was the Indonesian chef serving them breakfast. The police are still working out exactly what happened, but it is becoming increasingly clear the CastleAsia meeting was deliberately targeted.

Experts like Sidney Jones from the International Crisis Group, say it’s not clear if the terrorists knew about the regular Friday breakfast meeting well in advance or whether they learned about it after they’d checked in as guests days before the attack. Either way, it would have been an enticing target for a terrorist cell determined to kill as many Westerners as possible.

Not just any Westerners either; these were the elite of the business world in Jakarta. CEOs, diplomats, movers and shakers were regulars at the CastleAsia meeting.

Noke says he does want to continue to attend CastleAsia meetings, once its founder James Castle has fully recovered from his injuries. But Noke admits the venue will have to change. Even a hotel bristling with security is still too open, too public now.

The way business is done in Jakarta will have to evolve, too. One man who runs a similar networking company, James van Zorge, told me that for now they may have to meet “electronically” via Skype or video conferencing until confidence returns. And then perhaps the networking and social events will have to take place in private residences – almost in secret to ensure the terrorists can’t hit them again.

Expatriate businessmen interviewed say they are determined not to leave Indonesia. But until Noordin Top is caught, many feel holding a regular, meeting of Westerners in a public place is simply too risky.