China Official Says Country To Top U.S. Consumer Market By 2015

Starting a business is hard enough, but bringing a franchise to a foreign land — where languages, customs, laws and standard practices are completely different — poses a whole new set of problems.

Last weekend marks the official start of the holiday shopping season in the U.S., so for the next month, consumers will be enticed with daily deals on the latest fads, such as one-cup coffee makers, tablets, flat screens and cashmere sweaters.

For border officials in Hong Kong, baby formula trumps heroin. Since the former British colony on March 1 restricted outbound travelers to two 2-pound cans each, a syndicate has been cracked and more people have been arrested for smuggling milk powder than were detained all of last year for carrying heroin.

Shanghai just can't catch a break - first it was floating dead pigs, then ducks, then black swans, then mass chicken exterminations, and now fish.

Shanghai's rivers are in hot water for the second time this year after hundreds of kilos of dead fish were found rotting in one of the mega-city's waterways. Just weeks after over 16,000 putrefying pigs were pulled from Shanghai's Huangpu river, more than 250kg [550 lbs] of dead carp had to be retrieved from a river in the city's Songjiang district.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Treasury Secretary Geithner – and Secretary of State Clinton - meet with a high-level Chinese delegation.  (Could someone please update the Treasury’s schedule of events? At 7am on Monday it still shows last week’s agenda).

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