Now European governments and the IMF have agreed to lend a lot more money to the Greeks following their promises to behave just like Germans - clearly a triumph of hope over experience - markets have switched their focus to the more troubling threat that the US may be about to plunge over the so-called Fiscal Cliff.

What's that all about, what's likely to happen, and how should it shape our investment tactics?

The US federal government spends far more every year than it receives in revenues.

Partly that's because of the sluggishness of economic recovery following the debt crisis, which has reduced the bases, such as capital gains, on which taxes are calculated, and because the costs of the various hugely expensive measures taken to anaesthetize the pain.

But it's also partly because of the ever-increasing expense of entitlement programmes such as Medicaid (for the elderly) and Medicare (for the poor), for which the politicians have failed to provide proper funding.

The federal government has been overspending on a huge scale - by more than a trillion dollars every year, equivalent to nearly 9 per cent of the nation's entire economic output over the past four years.

To cover the gap between revenues and spending, known as the fiscal deficit, the Treasury borrows money to finance the spending. More and more of it, every year, passing on to future generations the costs of benefits being enjoyed now.

David Fuller's view Martin Spring, a worldly South African living in Thailand, writes as good a piece on the US Fiscal Cliff issue as I have seen. It is apolitical, balanced and very informative. I am only referring to the lead article and there are plenty of other subjects covered to interest most investors, not least actual ex-pat Americans or wannabes.