Bill Gross is one of the few who thinks he does know what's happening. He runs the $1.2 trillion PIMCO investment fund, the world's largest (and owned by Germany's Allianz insurance giant). And he has dumped PIMCO's entire $26 billion holding of U.S. Treasury bonds.

This may be a smart move, selling the bonds before the Fed stops shoring up the price by buying them as part of its quantitative easing project. But it is hardly a ringing endorsement of the U.S. economy and the widespread view that things are looking up.

Then the Fitch ratings agency, which has an excellent record on China, announced that it saw a 60 percent chance of a Chinese banking crisis by 2013.

Fitch was one of the first to spot the way Chinese banks were getting around official restrictions on lending by moving loans off balance sheets to shadowy and little-regulated trust companies. Many of these are linked to Local Government Financing Vehicles, which let municipal authorities share in the profits of the property boom and in effect give local authorities dangerous incentives to keep inflating the property bubble.

Since the start of 2009, Chinese banks have been lending money in extraordinary amounts, well more than $3 trillion. Even in a gung-ho economy like China, this is likely to end in tears, bad debts and a banking crisis.

Then the surprise news emerged that China's trade balance had gone into deficit to the tune of $7.3 billion, with exports down and imports rising not nearly enough to signal that long-awaited consumer boom. Even China isn't immune to rising oil prices.

And the euro is gearing up for what is starting to look like its annual springtime crisis, with Portugal in the front line but Spain is close to joining it after Moody's downgraded Spanish government debt.

The Brussels summit of the leaders of the eurozone countries Friday was supposed to come up with a kind of solution in which the weaker countries agree to adopt German-style fiscal discipline in return for German money. Few people think it will work and even fewer think that the EU is willing or able tackle the real underlying problems.

There are three. The first is that the interest rates being paid by the bailed-out countries, Ireland and Greece, are too high to give them much chance of repaying the money or of recovering from the crash. The second is that the eurozone banks, including the German banks, as a whole are still woefully undercapitalized. The third is that the European Central Bank last week signaled that it was poised to start raising interest rates again. This may please Germany's monetary purists but its spells even more pain for Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain.

The Greek tragedy is assuming surreal dimensions, with interest rates on its 10-year bonds reaching almost 13 percent, close behind the 15 percent unemployment rate -- a dreadful misery index. One Union Bank of Switzerland analyst commented that the ECB was living in "a parallel universe," unwilling to face the reality of the Greek disaster nor to admit the real frailty of Europe's banking system.

What this means is that the four giants of the global economy, the United States, Europe, Japan and China all seem to be in trouble at once and the fragile recovery that some see in the U.S. and German manufacturing industries looks problematic.

It is one thing to cheer the modest recovery in U.S. jobs but quite another to view it in the context of the widening U.S. trade deficit. The U.S. Commerce Department last week reported the deficit on international trade in goods and services was $46.3 billion in January, up from $40.2 billion in December and $27 billion in mid-2009, when the "recovery" began. And its preliminary estimate of gross domestic product growth at 2.8 percent was a real disappointment.

And then, of course, comes the rise in the oil prices, which is never good news for the energy-hungry U.S. and German and Chinese economies, nor for many of those emerging markets whose appetite for Western exports was supposed to help the advanced economies out of trouble.

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