KEY POINTS:
RUSSIA
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's popularity rests on Russia's impressive economic growth, built largely on exploiting its natural resources.
As President, he bought many privatised gas and oil companies back under government control, and rising energy prices have boosted state coffers.
But there are fears that banks
have lent too much and last week stock market trading was suspended three times as shares crashed and then bounced back dramatically.
The RTS Index has fallen by half this year, making it one of the worst performers globally, and anxiety about the invasion of Georgia is also undermining confidence.
Russia's central bank last week provided the three major banks - Sberbank, VTB and Gazprombank - with US$44 billion ($64 billion) in emergency funds to improve liquidity.
But the country's finances are in much better shape now than 10 years ago, when it defaulted on its international debts and triggered a global financial crisis, forcing the IMF to bail it out. Today, there is nearly US$600 billion in central bank reserves.
CHINA
According to the economic theory of "decoupling", China, with other emerging industrial powerhouses in the developing world, could continue to drive global growth in the event of an American slowdown.
That analysis is now being tested at a time when China's expansion - its GDP has grown by around 10 per cent or more this decade - appears to be slowing. Last week, it cut interest rates for the first time in six years, despite fears about inflation, demonstrating it is concerned about the effects of falling US demand.
It will be hit hard if its customers in the industrialised nations spend less, and there have already been factory closures. Growth rates for exports and incomes for city-dwellers are also down from last year. But growing domestic demand could keep the economy afloat; Chinese retail sales are rising by about 20 per cent a year.
BRAZIL
Until last week, it was business as usual. Foreign investors regarded it as a haven, attracted by an expanding affluent class and the most stable economic conditions for a decade.
While the London stock market shrank by 1.5 per cent last year, its Sao Paulo counterpart expanded by 93 per cent on a flood of foreign investment.
But, last Wednesday, the Sao Paulo stock exchange tumbled 6.74 per cent amid a sell-off that battered financial stocks, and fears that foreign investors will sell their Brazilian assets.
Shares in house builders plummeted on expectation that credit will be harder to come by and the booming housing market will grind to a halt.
THE EUROZONE
The ECB pumped ¬100 billion ($211 billion) into the financial system last week in a bid to ensure there are no banking collapses on the continent to mirror those in the US and the UK.
Some of the bigger eurozone countries are more vulnerable than others. In Spain and Ireland, property bubbles burst before the crisis in the US sub-prime market and both are likely to slip into recession.
But the largest, Germany and France, are partly buttressed by more cautious lending and tighter restrictions on personal credit.
Although the global slowdown will restrict economic growth, Germany's BdB, which represents the country's private banks, said: "There is no statistical evidence of a credit crunch in Germany."
JAPAN
Japan has already experienced a credit crunch, triggered when a real-estate crash in the early 90s revealed the extent of the exposure to its collapsing commercial property market.
If the 1929 Wall St crash provides governments with a useful guide to how not to handle an economic crisis, Japan's financial implosion also gives them a more recent example.
The failure of Lehman Brothers' Japanese arm constitutes the country's second-largest bankruptcy, but officials insist there is little danger of history repeating itself. The Bank of Japan governor downplayed concern that the US crisis will hurt the world's second-largest economy.
After the 90s crisis, it was nearly a decade before Japanese banks began to lend freely to each other. Policymakers in the West will be hoping America can recover far more quickly.
- OBSERVER
