The gurus to watch

Global strategists, financial crystal ball-gazers or plain economic analysts.

These are the voices that stand out from the crowd giving a new slant on trends and identifying emerging ones.

Among the best:

Paul Krugman

, who sprang to the fore during the late 1990s Asia crisis.

A contrarian who revels in his own contradictions, Krugman is also a sharp-tongued maverick, a trade theorist whose populist Peddling Prosperity gave him an early platform.

One of the first to burst the myth of the Asian Miracle, Krugman is not afraid to prick intellectual pomposity at any level.

Krugman says curing bad economics and catching false "facts" is a bit like flushing cockroaches down the toilet. "They always come back."

He can be found on the New York Times website.

David Hale

is a regular Downunder traveller (and everywhere else as well).

The peripatetic global analyst from the Zurich group writes erudite analyses. They are long - sometimes very long, but always comprehensive and insightful.

Hale does not shy from confrontation. The local bulls turned bear on Brierley Investments when he debunked BIL's exorbitant head office "palatial expenses" on a late 1990s visit.

Bloomberg's

Caroline Baum

is the "Fedwatcher of Choice". She's a ceaseless interpreter of 73-year-old Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's every movement (or non-movement) for bond traders worldwide.

Giving 'guidance" to market players recently, Baum noted: Greenspan is concerned that the markets will upend the nascent recovery by unnecessarily anticipating a stronger economy and aggressive Fed. "He probably thinks he can get some mileage from manipulating expectations and tempering expectations that the Fed will quickly take back its emergency stimulus (175 basis points) following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"For a New Economy guy like Mr Greenspan, the idea of this paint-by-numbers communication, of tailoring the economic outlook to a prescribed, multiple-choice box, is silly ... Greenspan tighten? Never. He's probably digging through his toolbox, dusting off his 'return to policy neutrality' spiel."

For global economic powerplays try Japanese strategist Kenichi Ohmae who says China is already mauling Asia's Tigers.

The author of the Borderless World and Mind of the Strategist observes it took the Asian tigers - Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Korea - more than 15 years to build their economies into symbols of new development. But it is taking China only a few years to supplant them.

Whenever China has competed directly with another nations industries, China has won. China is doing to the rest of the Asian economy what Japan did to the West 20 years ago. When its dominant position is established in Asia in the coming years, it will pose a greater political challenge to the rest of world than will Islamic extremists.