How Debris from the Earthquake and Tsunami Will Spread Across the Ocean
Maps Of U.S. Population Change, 2000-2010
When fund-raising is a crime
2011 BRICS summit. Indonesia should be pissed. South Africa over them? Really?
How Do You Cut Prison Populations And Costs? By Focusing On Parole And Probation
Why 60 Percent of Young People Support Torture. Not sure if this should be viewed as the decline of the American soft power or teenager naivety. Probably both...
Why do firms exist?
Emmanuel,
ReplyDelete"2011 BRICS summit. Indonesia should be pissed. South Africa over them? Really".
"S" for South Africa fits in the acronym "BRICS". Where does "I" fit? LOL!
ICan
Speculators and risk asset bubbles?
ReplyDelete"Is the FED driving commodity prices?". htt://business.financialpost.com/category/tradingdesk
"There is 95% correlation with the FED's total Treasury purchases and the CRB Commodity Index since the first round purchases began in April/May 2009. 80% correlation between QE2 and oil prices over the same period.
89% correlation with S&P 500 Index.
Negative -82% correlation between U$D and CRB etc.
$600 billion question is what happens to risk assets when QE2 ends?
ICan
(Video): Bond Guru Bets Against PIMCO's Bill Gross(and common wisom) On What Happens After QE2 Ends.
ReplyDeleteJeff Gundlach - CNBC video, Thursday April 14. Via Trader Mark.
ICan
Best read of the week, for me:
ReplyDeleteChina's Scary Housing Bubble - Room for Debate- NYTimes.com
Debaters are Michael Pettis, Simon Johnson, Victor Shih, Desmond Lachman, Yesheng Huang, C. Cindy Fan, Loren Brandt, Albert Park, Vikram Mansharamani.
Michael Pettis says not only r/e in bubble but also 'alternative assets". But, "China's financial system is designed to allow autorities to maintain stability. For that reason we should discount the likelyhood of a fall in prices leading to foreclosures and sales which themselves can cause prices to collapse".
"Long process of adjustment...probably not this year or next...".
Who know what's going on there. They can cook the numbers, print whatever. See my next link.
ICan
Black Swan Capital's currency currents newsletter available at their site.
ReplyDeletewww.blackswantrading.com -Currency Currents. Friday 15, April,2011.
"Run, China, Run".
"I read recently that China's internal security budget has surpassed its military budget. This regime would make Orwell proud in many fronts".
"China continues to believe it can make its problems just disappear. Running a country by a committee leads it to that conclusion. Can China afford to make its inflation problem disappear?...IF THEY REALLY DO REIGN IN CREDIT GROWTH, IT COULD BE GAME OVER and much prolonged boom will turn to bust...But I could be wrong or ...early...I should stop underestimating the ability of China's Politburo to make the laws of supplyand demand and market consequences of many years of misallocated capital disappear...".
"Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday the Central Bank reported that lending ...had expanded more rapidly in March than in Feb".
Bank of China is not independent of the Politiburo, it's political master.
Australia and Canada are tied to China's hip..Oh well they keep on printing...Just keep an eye on an exit.
ICan
Emmy,
ReplyDeleteGreat link fest.
I loved the article about "Why do firms exist?"
"Where trust in established institutions is scarce, it makes sense for companies to stretch their brands over many industries. And where capital and labour markets are inefficient, it makes equal sense for companies to allocate their own capital and train their own loyalists."
And from the "Why 60% of young people support torture":
ReplyDelete"Legal scholars see societal influences that may be responsible for de-stigmatizing torture, including increasingly graphic media. “I think it suggests the national conscious is becoming more and more corroded and more accustomed to the violation of fundamental principles of human rights and international law,” says Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, who blames programs like 24 that trivialize serious issues. (Tribe, along with nearly 300 legal colleagues, sent President Obama a letter last month decrying the prison conditions of Bradley Manning, the army private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.)"
Any one remember Abu Ghraib?
ReplyDeletePlus I think that so few of the young people have been subjected to real war (not including the many who HAVE served) and don't know the horrors.
And the horrors that they do know are experienced from the safety of the latest game.
Believe it or not, it is snowing here.
ReplyDelete@Rock,
ReplyDeleteYour fav. topic. Multinationals who have the most untaxed foreign income. ritholtz.com
"What U.S. companies have the most untaxed foreign income".
GE-------$94.B
Pfizer---48.2B
Merck----40.4B
JNJ------37B
XOM------35B
C--------32.1B
IBM------31.1B
PG-------30B
MSFT-----29.5B
Gamal Mubarak and brother Alaa- Inmates 23 and 24.
ReplyDelete"As Inmates 23 and 24 stunned Mubaraks adjust".
http://nytimes.com
Emmie - excellent link fest - the Japanese debris and population changes maps were fascinating.
ReplyDelete"Saudi Arabia minister says market oversupplies and cuts output". Reuters.com
ReplyDeletePrice is not high because there is a lack of supply, a Gulf OPEC delegate said on Sunday.
"China Orders Banks to Raise Reserves" - NYTimes.com
@Emmanuel117:
ReplyDeleteFantastic stories!
Just want to weigh in on the torture article. They don't delve into the "why" very much, but there is a little test that's run for certain security people, and it seems that the people who run Call of Duty and other like video games are substantially more willing to press the "destruct" button.
In the past, I've called it "the reset generation", when you're losing the game, simply hit the reset button and start over.
It's just that after torture, the starting over is quite difficult. It seems to me. The one thing lost sight here is that graphics and reality are opposite ends of the human spectrum.
@Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteYou really know how to hurt a guy....
Bloomberg had a vignette on tax revenue:
Private tax: 900B
Corporate tax:120B
The numbers in your comment add up to be almost 400B.
Now *that* would bring down the public debt pretty quick, eh?
Actually, I don't believe those numbers. The reason is that multinationals report revenues from wholly owned subsidaries, but these are untaxable because the subsidary is incorporated outside the US, and the money made/lost remains outside the US. It gets murky when there's intercorporate transfer of materials, like when I bought chip resistors for $50/each from a wholly owned subsidary in Ireland.
Those numbers aren't published, and it takes more than a standard audit to find that stuff. You need an insider whistle-blower to find that.
Remember that the IRS prosecuted only 1400 cases last year (2009) and prosecuted 1500 this year. There is far too much cheating for them to possibly find and prosecute.
The other difficulty is that multinational companies, whose US stock moves based on reported (worldwide) corporate revenues, is actually meaningless for valuation because none of that money ever comes back to support the valuation of the corporation in the US. So when you hear "the s&P is only 14 times earnings and that should be 22 times", that's meaningless because of the available money isn't where the valuation is being calculated.
Frankly, because of the multinational dodges available, I think the S&P is over valued now. Just my opinion.
And, as a last thought, that may be the reason all the pundits are saying invest in the emerging markets.
ReplyDeleteSince a lot of the US corporations' profits will remain in host countries, if the corporations want to grow that profit, they will invest in that host country's businesses. Those will be the businesses that grow, simply by the percentages of money available for investment.
Wow. Belize will have a truly awesome scuba diving business!