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Ludwig von Mises

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Fear And Loathing Along The Hedge Rows by Liz Moyer
 
 
New concerns are cropping up about some banks that may be over-reaching for a larger slice of the hedge fund market at a time when big funds are losing money.
31 may 05 @ 9:10 am

Greenberg Knew It All At AIG by David A. Andelman
 
 
AIG's more dire fiscal consequences have just begun to emerge publicly. The company said in a statement on Sunday that it will be correcting its accounting by adjusting its net worth by $2.7 billion. AIG also will restate its results from 2000 and for the third time will delay its 2004 annual report.
27 may 05 @ 7:52 am

Price dollars in oil, not oil in dollars by Chris Cook
 
 
The reality underpinning this epiphany is the fact that oil has "value", or "money's worth" - in exchange for commodities, goods and services - whereas the financial object we are accustomed to think of as the "dollar" is merely a "claim over value", or IOU issued by the US Federal Reserve Bank.
26 may 05 @ 8:45 am

Pax Dollarum by Bill Bonner
 
 
Nor is there any explanation for how the entire American economy could owe its Asian suppliers more and more money and yet still be a model of "good growth." But it was not good growth at all, but bad growth. It is the kind of growth you achieve just before you go bankrupt...or the fun you have just before you go to Hell. Imagine a church treasurer who runs off with the choir mistress and the new steeple fund; he sends back a postcard from Las Vegas: "Enjoying much personal growth. Have taken up smoking...drinking is fun too. Gotta run...gotta hit the slots while I still have some money left."
25 may 05 @ 9:35 am

The Long Wave Analyst by Ian Gordon

                                                                                          The Long Wave Analyst

The Kondratieff winter bear market is as vicious to share owners as the preceding bull market was generous.

Bull markets begin from a point of extreme investor pessimism. Indeed they begin when most people hate the very word ‘stocks.' We are nowhere near there. Confidence is far too high.

24 may 05 @ 9:37 am

Yuan revaluation won't help US, predicts Marc Faber by Dan Slater
 
 
Huge debt levels in the US means a revaluation (strengthening) of the Yuan is unlikely to help America says Marc Faber, the famously bearish author of the famous Gloom, Doom and Boom Report. He was speaking on the last day of the Beijing CLSA China forum.
 
23 may 05 @ 7:27 am

The Next Recession Has Started by Bob Hoye
 
 
In the summer of 2000, the Wall Street establishment was fretting about the increase in the discount rate to 6%. Anyone who had researched previous great financial bubbles would have observed that the senior central bank is typically 4 or 5 months behind daily market rates of interest. The part worth understanding is that short rates increase with the speculative party and decline as the party fails.
20 may 05 @ 7:21 am

The Rise of Red Capitalism by Jim Rogers
 
 
That dependency makes the renminbi a perfect candidate for a world currency – once its leaders allow it to be freely convertible and tradable on the world market. The sine qua non of free trade is that people can come and go with their money. When that will happen in China I do not know for certain. Surely, however, the Chinese have been feeling the pinch of buying commodities at high prices and selling goods at cheaper ones. One thing's for sure: China's leaders will not unpeg the renminbi to the dollar just because foreign politicians say they must. Ironically, when the Chinese pegged their currency to the dollar in 1994 the U.S. applauded it as a smart move.
19 may 05 @ 9:08 am

Italy's Economic Woes May Prompt First Euro Exit by Matthew Lynn
 

There are few technical obstacles to getting out of the euro. Yet only an Italian leader of impeccably pro-European credentials could do that. Funnily enough, the most likely person to become Italy's next prime minister is just such a man. Romano Prodi, the former president of the European Commission, led Berlusconi in an April poll by SWG Srl, with 61 percent support. Nobody could accuse Prodi of wanting to undermine the European Union.

18 may 05 @ 8:05 am

How Japan financed global reflation by Richard Duncan
 
 
Whatever its motivation, Japan was well rewarded for creating money and buying US Treasury bonds with it. Whereas the BOJ had failed to reflate the Japanese economy directly by expanding the domestic money supply, it appears to have succeeded in reflating it indirectly by expanding the global money supply through financing the sharp increase in the MOF's holdings of US Dollar foreign exchange reserves. There is no question as to if this happened. It did. The only question is was it planned (globally coordinated monetary policy) or did it simply occur by coincidence, driven by other considerations?
17 may 05 @ 8:22 am

United States: Credit Crunch? by Richard Berner
 
 
Fears of a credit crunch are plaguing financial markets once again.  Wider credit spreads and losses in credit derivatives have triggered concerns that contagion will spread into other rungs of the credit ladder, and thus worries about a credit crunch that would at least further dislocate markets and at worst derail already-slower economic growth.  As evidence for those fears, representative high-yield spreads over BBB-rated debt have widened by roughly 130 bp in the past month, after jumping more than 100 bp from their February lows, while AA-BBB spreads have increased by roughly 15 bp.
16 may 05 @ 8:55 am

US begging for dollar devaluation by Jephraim P Gundzik
 
 
Pressure from the Bush administration and the US Congress on Beijing to float the exchange rate of the yuan is increasing. But there is no economic justification for changing China's fixed-exchange rate regime. Rather than yuan revaluation, US demands for exchange rate adjustment in China should be seen for what they are: Washington's explicit support for dollar devaluation.
13 may 05 @ 7:13 am

Keeping Your Stash in Cash by Richard Benson
 
 
Risk is becoming a nasty four letter word. Stocks are down for the year, junk bond holders are lightening up as credit spreads widen, and it's likely that GM and Ford won't be the only big issuers to see credit downgrades now that the credit cycle has turned. Hedge Funds are also struggling to see positive returns, commodities are well off their highs, and even gold and silver stock investors have recently been taken to the cleaners. Virtually every investor in almost every asset class, who has placed bets, has suddenly discovered that they are actually a losing speculator.
12 may 05 @ 7:34 am

The Southhampton HedgeFund by Mark Pierce III
 
 
Wonder why some hedge funds are under pressure? Look no further than the wild moves occurring in the stock market. You will find spectacular squeezes, epic collapses, even some stocks that are simply immobilized, catching the most seasoned traders off guard.
11 may 05 @ 6:23 am

Meet The CIA's Venture Capitalist
 
 
Compensating the CIA's dealmakers is a trickier issue. Venture typically capitalists get a salary and a hefty stake in the returns from companies they fund. To be competitive, In-Q-Tel had to do something similar. And, Louie says, having some skin in the game keeps staffers motivated to do the best deals. So from 20% to 40% of an employee's salary goes into a mandatory fund. For every $3 invested in a company, $1 from an employee fund is also invested.
10 may 05 @ 6:16 am

Critical Junctures by Clive Maund
 
 
Gold is now at a critical juncture, perched right on its long-term uptrend line, following a down day on Friday, and although we must assume that the uptrend remains intact until broken, it would nevertheless be wise for us to attempt to figure out ahead of time what will happen should it go on to break down from the uptrend.

 
9 may 05 @ 3:45 pm

Still Think Ford, General Motors Can't Go Bust? by Mark Gilbert
 
 
It now costs about $865,000 per year to insure $10 million of GM debt for five years by using credit derivatives, up from about $213,000 at the start of the year. Insurance on Ford debt costs about $690,000, up from $173,000. The higher the cost of insurance, the less certain investors are that their debts will get repaid.
 
GM owes its bondholders about $113 billion, of which almost $15 billion falls due this year with an additional $27 billion scheduled for repayment next year. Bond investors have lent $97 billion to Ford, with $12 billion repayable this year and almost $20 billion in 2006.
6 may 05 @ 7:42 am

BIS Papers No. 22 - Investigating the relationship between the financial and real economy
 
 
The first deals with the influence that financial conditions have on aggregate expenditure and overall economic developments. The second theme reverses the direction and looks at the impact of the macroeconomic environment on the financial health of different economic sectors. Finally, the third theme deals with the evolving nature of the measurement of financial risk both at the micro level of individual economic units and at the macro level of whole sectors or the overall economy.
5 may 05 @ 6:47 am

Greenspan or Buffett? Asia Mulls Who's Right by William Pesek Jr.
 
 
The issue is far from academic, something that's clear from the intense interest among policy makers here in Istanbul for the annual Asian Development Bank meeting. Be it discussions about growth outlooks, poverty or infrastructure, the risk of a dollar crisis is sure to come up.
 
It troubles many Asians that a man as admired as Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Buffett could so publicly bet on a plunging dollar. It's fine for George Soros to be down on the dollar given his distaste for the Bush administration; it's another to see the ``Sage of Omaha'' doing the same.
4 may 05 @ 7:29 am

Ten Laws Of The Modern World by Rich Karlgaard
 
 
Moore's Law
The Back Side of Moore's Law
Andy and Bill's Law
Metcalfe's Law
Gilder's Law: Winner's Waste
Ricardo's Law
Wriston's Law
The Laffer Curve
Drucker's Law
Ogilvy's Law
3 may 05 @ 6:13 am

How Much Real Estate $1 Million Buys by Sara Clemence
 
 
Time was (and not so long ago), that seven figures could buy you something really special. A penthouse with amazing views. A stunning Hamptons home. A really, really great place in California. On the beach.

2 may 05 @ 3:52 am

Should You Sell Your Home? by Gary North
 
 
An overpriced house tends to disrupt homes.

If I were in the letter-writer’s shoes, I would start looking for a new job in a new state. I would put my money to better use. That $600,000 in cash would buy six or seven houses debt-free in my area. He could be paid at least $7,000 a month in rental income, and probably would double his money in seven or eight years. Or he could make down payments, buy 20 homes, and get renters to pay off his mortgages in 20 years.

1 may 05 @ 5:50 pm


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If an exchange between two parties is voluntary,
it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it.
Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight,
from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie,
that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
 
Milton Friedman

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Diogenes Laertius

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If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others . . . the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money."  No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity . . . to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
 
Ayn Rand

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