Venezuela has started collecting its new foreign oil companies windfall profits tax, as part of President Hugo Chavez' plan to gain a larger share of oil company profits, The Associated Press reported.

The tax is based on the monthly average price of benchmark Brent crude oil. The tax kicks in when the price of benchmark Brent crude sits above $70 per barrel, The Wall Street Journal(subscription required) reported. If oil prices remain above that threshold for one month, the state will take 50% of the difference between this average and the final sale price of every barrel. When Brent crude exceeds the $100-a-barrel average, the rate will rises to 60%.

'21st-century socialism'

President Chavez, a Socialist, has said the tax is necessary to fund key social programs as part of his effort to implement an economic and social system he calls "21st-century socialism." Critics say the tax will slow investment and development in the oil sector, and also discourage other foreign direct investment in Venezuela.

Here's a concept at least one economist (and probably others) would like to see: a of shift some GDP growth from China to the United States.

China reported that Q4 GDP growth totaled a blistering 11.2%, with 2007 GDP growth coming in at 11.4%, China's fourth consecutive year of double-digit GDP gains.

China approaches U.S, E.U.

China's GDP is now $3.4 trillion, still behind the U.S. and the European Union. However, in purchasing power parity terms, China's GDP is roughly the same as the U.S. and E.U.'s.

Moreover, China's 2007 GDP gains came despite the fact that the Chinese government has undertaken several measures -- from interest rate hikes, to price hikes, to limits on investment, among other decisions -- to slow its overheated economy.

China increased benchmark interest rates for the sixth time this year Thursday, the Chinese government announced, in the government's latest attempt to slow surging growth and rising inflation in the world's second-largest economy, Reuters reported.

The People's Bank of China increased its benchmark one-year deposit rate by roughly one-quarter percentage point, or 27 basis points, to 4.14%, and also raised the one-year lending rate about one-fifth percentage point, or 18 basis points, to 7.47%. The central bank's last interest rate increase occurred in September, Reuters reported.

Earlier this year, China's monetary officials shifted their monetary bias from "prudent" to "tight' to slow the nation's double-digit GDP growth economy.

Economic boom

China's GDP has grown more than 10% for more than four years, serving as a centerpoint for not only emerging market development in Asia, but also as an engine for global growth. Low-cost labor and the nation's weak currency, the yuan (which is fixed at an artificially low rate, a trading band, by the Chinese government), have fueled an export boom and a large trade surplus. That surplus has led to many benefits for the world's most populous nation, including rising real incomes, an expanded middle class and historic economic development, but has also stoked inflation.

Further, monetary and industrial officials in the world's other major economic regions in the United States and Europe have urged Chinese officials to slow the nation's economy -- and implement other reforms -- to take price pressure off commodities (such as oil) and resources.

Sudden large, negative financial events can disrupt, or at least critique, even the most bedrock economic tenets, let alone recently-percolated conventional wisdom.

On the heels of the housing and credit market crunches, one conventional wisdom item that's currently coming under criticism is the notion of "decoupling" [Subscription required] - the theory that despite a slowing U.S. economy, the European and Asian engines of growth would be sufficient to maintain adequate global GDP growth, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The International Monetary Fund published a chapter in April 2007 entitled "Decoupling the Train," which argued that the U.S.'s mild GDP growth was caused by a housing sector correction. Housing was less global than other commodities, it argued, and hence would not impact the world economy as much.

For example, about two months ago, the IMF projected that global economic growth would slow just slightly in 2008 to 4.8% from 5.2% this year.

It's pretty well known that foreign investors own quite a bit of the American landscape these days (not at dangerous levels, yet) and are servicing a huge load of the debt this country has -- mostly in the consumer sector. Is this a good thing for the U.S. economy? In terms of foreign confidence in out economy, it is.

FDI (foreign direct investment) in the U.S. rose over 67% in 2006 over 2005 levels, which would get most informed economists do a double-take. "This huge increase in foreign investment is a remarkable vote of confidence in the U.S. economy and the American worker," says Todd Malan, president and chief executive officer of the Organization for International Investment (OFII).

If we look all the way back to 1997, it's pretty easy to chart FDI through the last nine years or so and plot it against the status of the nation in various years within that period; the Internet boom, the terrorist attacks, the slow years, and the rebound years (including 2007 so far). According of the OFII, the renewed optimism from foreign firms investing in the U.S. economy is a stark contrast to their attitudes toward reinvestment in their American subsidiaries just a few decades ago, according to Forbes.

Are more and more countries seeing the U.S. as a base of opportunity and an economy of brightness as we hunker down and make it through the last few years of this decade?

All signs points to yes so far.