Looking back on this year to early March, you'll find the precise point when the U.S. stock market seemed to find its bottom. The Dow has had a tremendous rally since then, but just about everyone is concerned about what it means.

Dropping commercial real estate values is leading fears of a double-dip recession.

Does the recovery lack any real support from economic fundamentals? It is jacked-up on stimulus programs that governments will soon try to unwind– and with what consequences?

Many analysts argue that the consequence will be the dreaded double dip.

As Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com, told CNN Money this week: "If we do slide back into recession, it will be very difficult to get out."

Some economists are so concerned they want another round of stimulus early next year because the U.S. labor market is still so weak.

About two months ago, I sat down with Steve Palm of "Smart Numbers," a Real Estate analysis company. He feared that so many commercial developments and large housing projects were defaulting it all but assured a double dip sometime in the middle of 2010. It was a dire prediction that stuck with me.

Checking back with him this week, I am sorry to say that the situation from his vantage point is no better. Palm still sees "Way too much stuff coming back to the banks." "This is causing poor liquidity as the banks still cannot lend. The dollar is way too weak too."

Small regional banks continue to go under across the United States. Most of them are going down because of foreclosures on large commercial real estate ventures. Palm sees no end in sight, and fears that if unemployment keeps mounting and housing indicators start falling again, it will be ample evidence of the "W-shaped" trend that analysts say signals an imminent double dip.

The bankruptcy rate further complicates how to gauge this recovery. As unemployment drags on and home values continue to suffer, personal bankruptcies surged 9 percent in October, with a 7 percent jump in business bankruptcies. The American Bankruptcy Institute also expects total bankruptcies in 2009 to reach almost 1.5 million. That's an increase of 30 percent from last year.

Analysts say given all of these factors, the way governments unwind the current stimuli will be key in determining whether the recovery is sustainable, or whether it slides once again. How will we know? CNN Money.com has a great primer on six key indicators to watch if you're concerned as well.

How to protect our own investment portfolios in 2010 is something we should all be discussing. Stay tuned for more on World Business Today.

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.

I've got my own piece of Berlin Wall stuffed away somewhere in my house. I had borrowed a hammer and chisel from a man at the wall and hacked off my very own piece.

West Berliners crowd in front of the Berlin Wall as they watch East German border guards demolish a section of the wall.

It was a week after "Checkpoint Charlie" - a crossing point between Easy and West Germany - in Berlin had been thrown open, a week after a divided city and a divided Germany were reunited.

I had flown over from London with friends for a first-hand view of history. We arrived late on a snowy Friday evening, found a cheap place to stay and headed out into the night. Every bar, every cafe was packed with exuberant West Germans and uncertain East Germans. But everywhere we went, the air of German brother/sisterhood was palpable. Everyone was so positive. We were all Germans, they told us. It would be a seamless unification. Only a few people voiced their concern about how exactly this would work.

We stayed up all night, drinking and talking to Germans. In the morning we headed for the checkpoint ourselves. It was packed with people; all along the wall people were busy trying to knock it down. One other snapshot that still stays with me is the East Germans pulling overloaded shopping baskets full of consumer goods back across the dividing zone to their homes. Little things like washing up trays for the kitchen sink, boot polish, soft drinks. Anything, as long as it wasn't made in the German Democratic Republic.

We snatched a few hours sleep that afternoon and went back out into the night to join the party. The feeling of optimism was still burning.

Well, as history shows, reunification turned out to be much harder, more expensive and longer than anyone could have seen. A few months after the wall came down I visited the former East Germany working on a story about East Germany Inc. being up for sale. An enormous firesale of outdated factories and machinery. Buyers were only interested in the property, and as long as they could get rid of most of the workforce.

Fast forward to today. Think of another communist economy. And think of the difference. This economy is leading the world out of recession, this economy is, at the moment, one of the great hopes for global economic growth, this economy now lectures the U.S. on economic policy. This economy is China. Two decades ago this day, East German communism was finally put to rest. In China, it's going from strength to strength.

BARCELONA, Spain - Cell phone manufacturers and network operators may be able to ride out the recession as consumers view their handsets as an essential rather than a luxury, but there's a potential dark cloud on the horizon for the mobile technology industry - the capacity crunch.

As our appetite for mobile internet and data services continues to grow, thanks to devices like the iPhone, mobile service providers are soon going to fiind that their networks won't cope with demand.

Too much traffic will clog the wireless highway and the networks know that they have to invest heavily in their infrastructures to head off the problem.

In the current economic downturn they'll find it hard to raise the required funds by borrowing and are reluctant to pass on the cost to consumers who are unwilling to pay more.

The most likely solutions, mobile advertising and peak time network congestion charging are also unpallatable. So there's no easy answer to this thorny issue, which is one of the main talking points here at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Watch more about the capacity crunch

I've just completed my first two big CEO interviews planned for this week at the Mobile World Congress, and they couldn't have been more different.

First it was Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, who is here to launch an upgrade to the Windows mobile operating system (look out for my TV reports for details).

Steve's a cool guy and gave us a great interview, but before we could talk to him we had to negotiate the huge, highly efficient Microsoft media machine.

We were placed into the care of no less than four different minders before being ushered into the great man's hotel suite overlooking the conference venue for our 10-minute audience which was over all too quickly.

Contrast that with the welcome we got at RIM, the makers of BlackBerry devices.

I know it's a much smaller company, but the atmosphere at their show "chalet" was so much more relaxed and informal.

Joint CEO Jim Balsillie was his usual, cheerful and irreverent self and gave his time generously, even when I asked him awkward questions about stock options which have been getting RIM into the news for all the wrong reasons. (You can see both interviews throughout the week on CNN or here at cnn.com.)

Otherwise, it's been a crazy first morning here at the Congress. First job of the day was an early call on a company called Tellabs, which helps mobile operators get the best out of their networks.

They told us about a survey they commissioned in which they asked mobile consumers about their future plans. The results have given the mobile telecoms industry confidence it can weather the worst of the economic downturn.

It showed that while people may be reluctant to splash out on a handset upgrade in the near future, they aren't planning to cut back on the number of calls they make or the amount of data they use.

It would seem that we just can't live without our beloved mobiles and in a recession our phone bills will be considered by many as essential spending.

LONDON, England – In life, there are always decisions you want to keep on putting off. In my case, the one that always stresses me out centers on the heating oil tank in my garden.

 It's no great beauty - a big green plastic job that could probably swallow up two entire bedrooms in one of those Japanese capsule hotels, but which apparently holds 2,500 liters of fuel.In these days of wildly fluctuating crude prices, working out when to fill the wretched thing is a task requiring the greatest wisdom, calculation and foresight.

The seesawing price of oil has given consumers worldwide much to consider during 2008.

It is not helped by the fact that the local company with which we have a supply agreement employs a high-pressure salesman to answer the phone, quote the latest price per liter and coax customers into buying as many liters as possible.

His strong-arm tactics probably earn him an annual bonus which would not disgrace an oil company mogul.

What he knows is that those of us who use oil to heat and cook in the winter (I know, not desperately environmental, we have no mains gas supply but do have a solar panel and turn the oil off for six months each year) can imagine nothing worse than being stranded with an empty tank just as the extended family descends for the holidays and Jack Frost starts to tighten his wintry grip.

Desperate + gullible = ripped off. Game on, I thought last April. I cheated the man on the phone at the oil company of a few pounds in bonus by refusing to buy a full tank of oil at what I felt to be an inflated price of 51.5 pence per liter (around 65 euro-cents or US$1.03).

Instead I persuaded my skeptical wife to order a mere 500 liters, on the basis that this would be enough to last until nearly the end of the year, by which time (I said, crossing my fingers) crude prices would be way back down again from around $110 a barrel and heating oil would be way cheaper.

Over the summer, I chewed my nails as crude rose majestically to $147 a barrel, taking my wife's eyebrows up with it. I could see that I was going to be saddled with yet another financial clanger, my eternal optimism (see last week's blog) dragging the family budget and my personal credibility down with it.

But then my bet started to pay back. Crude prices slid and slid and slid, all the way down to around $40 a barrel.

I started to dream of a holiday in the sun on the basis of all the money we had saved by holding back on buying oil and waiting for the price to drop; after all, if the price drops 10 euro-cents, that's a saving of €250 on a full tank. If you go away to somewhere sunny, you're not even consuming any oil!

Then, out of the blue, my wife rang me at work. The oil in the tank was getting dangerously low and would only last another week.

It might run out just as... well, this is nearly the week before the holidays and you can guess the rest.

But luckily, she told me, she had spoken to the man at the oil supply company and he would fill our tank for 37.5 pence a liter. I sighed.

The connection between crude prices and the price of heating oil to consumer dorks like me is actually more tenuous and delayed than you'd think.

Even so, I valiantly weighed the odds. On the one hand, crude demand is falling, and will probably fall further as the global economy struggles to shake off recession next year.

On the other hand, petroleum prices have been underpinned by OPEC's determination to tighten supply; Saudi Arabia, the "swing producer" in the producer cartel and its biggest player, is already rumored to be cutting the amount of oil it exports.

In the end, the salesman won - more or less. My wife rang around, got a lower quote, called him back and got him to match it.

So next week the truck will roll up, the man will jump out and run out his hose to the green plastic thing, turn a switch - and we'll be warm and cosy over the holidays.

We'll also be £900, or $1,340, poorer off. So were we robbed? Should I have held on, maybe bought another 500 liters (at a slightly higher price; the salesman knows his job)? Or was I right to get my personal big oil deal out of the way before OPEC tightens demand? What do you think? How have changing oil prices had an impact on your life? Post your questions and comments below, and we'll put them to an expert on Friday's edition of Business International. (It's helpful if you also say where you are writing from.)  And here are some answers from Philip Sellwood, chief executive of the Energy Saving Trust 

LONDON, England - This is all getting seriously ugly.  The U.S. labor market shed some 533,000 non-farm jobs in November, and it now turns out that in September - before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the consequent severe volatility on global stock markets - U.S. unemployment was already starting to surge.

It was just a few days ago that we were told the gurus at the U.S. National Bureau for Economic Research had decided that we could use the word "recession" to describe the economic conditions in the United States. But now, with jobs disappearing fast, confidence in shreds and the "Big Three" carmakers holding out the begging bowls in Washington, the word "depression" is starting to be on everyone's lips.

I admit to being the eternal optimist.  I'm not ashamed to say so - I would actually hate to be thought of as a pessimist - but must also confess that it comes with a big personal price tag: for example, ever hopeful, I hung on in there in the stock market for longer than was wise. Watch Michael O'Sullivan of Credit Suisse discuss Europe's options

So it pains me to write this, but given that this recession has already lasted longer than many of its peers - and is widely forecast to last longer than most of them – perhaps we can no longer rule out a depression, a prolonged and dramatic downturn lasting well into 2010.

It's a scenario nobody wants.  But every government and every central bank in the world is now united in fighting to avoid it

Hours before those U.S. labor market numbers stunned financial markets, Europe was launching a broad-fronted counterattack.  The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and Sweden's Riksbank slashed their key interest rates; in the case of the ECB, the 0.75 percentage point reduction was the biggest cut in its 10-year history.  In Germany, the Bundestag voted through the federal government's $39 billion fiscal stimulus package, just as the French President Nicolas Sarkozy chose the car-making city of Douai to announce a similar package worth $32 billion.

In fact, each day now brings news of European Union leaders and the European Commission working closely together to show they are putting up a united front against the recession.  But what is striking is that nobody says they can stop it in its tracks, whatever they do.  The most they can do, say most economists, is soften the pain of recession and ensure it lasts no longer than it has to.

All this comes at a price.  France's latest effort to boost its economy will probably lift its national debt to 3.9% of GDP, and like all prudent governments, it will have to pay that back out of the taxpayer's pocket once normality has returned.  Virtually every European government will be doing the same: borrowing big-time now, and repaying later.

Central banks also face a dilemma.  They have had no choice but to loosen the monetary floodgates in an effort to induce the commercial banks to start lending again; that is essential if businesses are to invest and employ more people, and if individuals are to restart consumer spending.

But lower interest rates take many months to generate their full impact on the economy, and central bankers worry that growth will snap back, forcing up prices and unleashing inflation.

Imagine trying to drive a car along a highway with steering that only responds, say, 30 seconds after you've turned the wheel.  How long before you dive into the ditch?

So there is an argument which says that governments and central banks might do better to stay on the sidelines and let the recession take its course rather than take expensive and risky measures which are never going to stop it anyway.

What do you think?  Are Europe's governments and central banks doing enough to fight off recession, apart from avoiding policy measures which might make things even worse?  Should they actually bother to do anything?  Are they just making things worse? Watch Michael O'Sullivan from Credit Suisse Asset Management answer your questions

LONDON, England – Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown blames city bankers for the "age of irresponsibility" that ultimately led to the global financial crisis. While announcing the effective nationalisation of three big British banks he attacked the "excessive risk taking" of some financial institutions.

One thing is clear: the age of 'easy credit' is over. Banks, we're told, will be tightening their loan criteria.

Fearing that this new financial landscape could leave ordinary people unable to secure loans and mortgages, the UK government says that the newly nationalised banks will be required to restore lending to 2007 levels.

The opposition argues that this will lead to a return to the record lending levels we saw before the credit crunch began to bite, and that people will once again be able to rack up more debt than they can afford to repay.

Not so says finance minister Alistair Darling, who insists he "does not want a return to the irresponsible problems of the past."

So why did I return home last night to find a mailshot from my bank containing credit card checks at an "attractive interest rate" (almost double the rate available this time last year), which I am free to use for "unexpected bills, home repairs or even a holiday?" And why has my credit limit increased?

I'm confused!

LONDON, England - If, like me, you are one of the 350,000 British or Dutch nationals who have savings accounts with Internet bank Icesave, you're probably pretty angry right now.

Iceland's second-largest bank, Landsbanki, the parent company of Icesave, says that it has gone into receivership and that the Icelandic Financial Services Authority has appointed a receivership committee. The Icelandic government stepped in to take control of the bank on Tuesday to keep it afloat, just days after Icesave was posting messages on its Web site reassuring savers that the bank was solvent and immune to the worst effects of the credit crisis because it didn't have exposure to the toxic U.S. sub-prime mortgage market.

Today, Icesave's customers were greeted by a message informing them that the bank was unable to process deposits or withdrawal requests. If the company is liquidated thousands of customers like me, with deposits under £50,000, are likely to face a long and stressful wait to retrieve their money.

Lured by attractive Icelandic interest rates I had just under £10,000 of savings deposited with Icesave. We'd worked hard to put it by and intended to use the money for non- budgeted items like home maintenance and improvements, family holidays and car repairs. It's money that I don't need in the short term, unlike other Icesave customers who had pension funds and home purchase deposits invested there.

For many of the bank's customers today will have been their first taste of the effects of the global financial crisis. Let's hope we won't have to experience many more.

If you've been affected by the collapse of Icesave, I can't help you get your money back but I can offer you the opportunity to share your experience with us and vent your frustration. Were we foolish to be lured by the kind of interest rates that simply aren't on offer in the UK or the Netherlands? Who do you think is to blame? Hit the comment button below and tell me your story. Getting it out there just might help you feel a little less sore.

LONDON, England – To look at the skyline behind our live shot position in the city of London you could be forgiven for thinking that the credit crunch has left the construction industry unscathed. There appear to be more cranes than tall buildings on the horizon.

But a quick straw poll of contacts, friends and family working in the sector suggests that Britain's constructors are actually finding the going pretty tough. Hardly an exhaustive scientific survey I know, but I thought you'd be interested to read what they had to say.

The chief executive of a publicly listed, national builder told me recently that while he was confident his company was well placed to take advantage of any recovery, the next 18 to 24 months were going to be painful. The rising cost of raw materials had already hit the bottom line and the severe slowdown, some might say almost complete standstill in new home construction was particularly worrying. Under his stewardship the company has built enough of a cushion to weather the most severe economic downturn, but what pains him most, he told me, is the very real possibility that he will have to let go of some of his loyal, longstanding workforce if there's no light at the end of the tunnel within the next year. He also worries that the employees of long standing suppliers would face a similar fate if he was unable to continue putting orders their way.

My good friend Jonathan Rubins, a director at Stephen Howard Homes, a medium sized regional house builder says that concern over the availability of mortgages and the fact that people are worried for their jobs has led to a significant stagnation in sales to the general public. However, the rental market, he says, is enjoying considerable growth. Thus while ‘buy to let' mortgages have become more difficult to obtain for smaller investors, landlords looking to build a property portfolio are finding that mortgages are still available at good loan to value ratios and are bringing custom his way.  This, he says, is a regional phenomenon. If his company were based anywhere other that the South East, he fears his outlook would be far less positive. 

My brother in law, Jonathan helps to run Taylor and Stapleton Engineering, a medium-sized family firm specialising in heating and ventilation. The good news is that there has been no noticeable slowdown in business orders for him ... yet. He is by no means complacent. He says that the commercial sector of the industry in the south east of England is being helped along at the moment by the construction of the 2012 Olympic venues. He is braced for a slowdown if and when it arrives but is confident in the company's specialist expertise. Even if new build orders slow there should always be a market in refurbishments, which need to be completed regardless of economic circumstances. Jonathan has however noticed pressure in terms of wage demands as employees struggle to cope with the increased cost of living with food, fuel and especially utility prices rising fast.

Francis Biro is one of those rare finds - a local builder who is so good at what he does that he seldom needs to advertise his services. Word of mouth and recommendation are what brought him to our attention and that of many other local families. Francis says that while he's not short of work yet, he is concerned about the lack of new enquiries. Not long ago he was getting at least one a week and always had drawings on his desk, the next job lined up and ready to go. Now he finds himself getting to the end of one project with no new work in sight. Fortunately, he hasn't yet found himself idle but worries that it's only a matter of time before he encounters gaps between jobs.

Francis hopes that as the housing market slows and people find it harder to move home, they will instead turn to people like him to extend their current property. The problem there is of course that loans for such projects will in all probability be harder to come by and perhaps prohibitively expensive.