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The big banks were quietly peeved with Jim Flaherty this week. While the Finance Minister got out of Dodge in a hurry after his March 21 budget, heading to East Asia within 36 hours of his speech, his mortgage mantra didn't fade from the fray.

The finger-wagging Finance Minister continues to chastise any push for lower mortgage rates, which is an astonishing move for a small c-conservative.

The big banks are bending over backward to look compliant with this new Calvinist mortgage policy, and yet they're quietly pushing debt on consumers because, well, they have to. There are few other safe places for banks to deploy capital.

It's hard to walk into a bank branch these days and not be offered a mortgage discount. Even our website brims with ads for rates under 3 per cent. A banker told me his group was none too happy with Flaherty for telling them how to do business, but at the same time said "it's a marketer's dream."

The mortgage flap has led to more media discussion of low rates than anyone might have anticipated. So in that respect, the Flaherty sermons have backfired, the banker said. Bankers hate the stories about the controversy with the Finance Minister, who wants them to publish rates no one really pays. But they know there will be crowds in branches asking about 2.9 per cent and less.

Chris vs. Chris launches on Monday. The satirical video series has online politics editor Chris Hannay debating himself on the issues of the day. You can vote for who won the debate starting Monday and follow @chrisvschris on Twitter.

The Globe's China bureau is one of our greatest assets, a place that has been part of our editorial soul since 1959 when Frederick Nossal opened it before any American outlets could get into "Red China." We've had many great correspondents there, from Charles Taylor and John Burns to John Fraser, Geoffrey York and for the past four years Mark MacKinnon.

Mark is heading to London, after posts in Beijing, Jerusalem, Moscow, and before joining the Globe, Johannesburg. Before leaving China, he embarked on a rail journey to retrace the Communist Party's Long March of the 1930s. The result is this fascinating story, a rich documenary, and a blog chronicle of the journey. He was accompanied by our award-winning Vancouver-based photographer, John Lehmann, himself a sinophile, to document the world's great new power – and how the Chinese see their future.

One of the remarkable stories about their journey is how much of it was imitated and copied by others.

At one stage, Mark wrote to me:

"Here's how China's Reference News [ with three-million readers] covered our trip. Some flat-out thievery of John's photos, but a fairly accurate description of what I wrote, including my observation that China would win more Nobel Prizes if people could read and think what they want ... [and] from the sina.com news portal ... the Yahoo! News of China ..."

In Canada, we at The Globe like to fight for intellectual property rights. In China, we (like so many foreign operations) just shake our heads and wonder what the future holds.

Speaking of the future and information, I was at a Google summit in New York this month, discussing the future of media.

Here are eight revelations from Google and the publishers they do business with the most:

1. Brands matter, the Google executives stressed. They believe big brands will get bigger, and the global ones will prevail as distribution is ubiquitous, and will only get easier and cheaper.

2. Quality matters. In the crowded world of digital media, people are gravitating to quality. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said 70 per cent of Internet users visit fewer than 15 sites a month. Humans have not changed, he said. They want reliable brands and a common human experience.

3. Think offline. Just as Apple pulled off a masterstroke with its stores (Remember online-only Dell?) media need to plant their flags wherever consumers fancy. Forbes is using its printed magazine to drive readers to its digital product and to project the brand from magazine racks to hotel rooms.

4. The mobile surge is well under way. In the United States, 47 per cent of media screen time is on mobile, 38 per cent on phone and 9 per cent on tablet. Twenty-four per cent is on desktops. The rest is TV. Smartphone sales doubled in US last year. And mobile is not just for texting, search and weather updates. Mobile video is about to change everything. Think Mansbridge on the subway. That's big for advertisers as video is the fastest growing area of ad spending.

5. It's a multidevice world. Smartphones won't eliminate smart TVs, which won't kill tablets. Just yet. We're all living on multiple devices, often at the same time. Advertisers need to figure out how to bridge the devices with different messages and experiences.

6. Content costs are plunging. Forbes contracts 1,200 contributors for low-cost or free "community" content and has gone from 6 million monthly unique visitors to 50 million. The crowd publishes 500 posts a day, written by consultants, professors, business owners – anyone who values "Forbes contributor" on their LinkedIn profile.

7. Advertising is shifting from placement to performance. What's called programmatic buying has changed advertising the way search changed publishing. Online ad exchanges, often run by Google, automatically place ads wherever you go, based on your reading. They don't need The Globe to find you. So media such as us need to build packages of media experiences, from video to e-books and guarantee to deliver a certain number of customers. Advertisers not longer want eyeballs; they want "propensity to buy."

8. Culture change is the biggest challenge of all. American media executives – Gannett, McClatchy, NBC, ESPN, Hearst – all spoke like battle-scarred veterans. Their newsrooms and ad departments had been eviscerated, but out of the ashes they see hope in leaner and ultimately more viable business models.

Enjoy the weekend,