Bloomberg reported on a rather peculiar announcement from the Chinese officialdom, which comes off as a rather lame rationalization of its ban on rare earths exports. If you are late to this cause celebre, rare earths confusingly really aren’t rare, but they are found only in fairly low concentrations and are nasty to mine. They […]
Read more...A couple of articles in the Wall Street Journal, reporting on a conference at the Boston Fed, indicates that some people at the Fed may recognize that the central bank has boxed itself in more than a tad. The first is on the question of whether the Fed is in a liquidity trap. A lot […]
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager who writes for New Deal 2.0 Although I have consistently taken the line that QE is totally useless, in effect an accounting trick which does little for real economic activity, I should have at least acknowledged its powers in terms of fomenting casino-like speculation in […]
Read more...This post first appeared on May 9, 2008 The question above may seem foolish. Oil has just passed $124 a barrel despite improvement in the dollar. Commodities prices are moving less in lockstep than before (gold and wheat in particular have backed off significantly from their highs) suggesting that buying is not the result of […]
Read more...Last night, some fresh comments by Obama Administration officials confirmed its cynicism and duplicity in its Ministry of Truth version of health care reform. It’s one thing to suspect Team Obama was playing the public for a fool, quite another to have proof. Today we have more corroboration of Obama Administration double dealing, this on […]
Read more...An ongoing China v. Japan/US row is getting interesting, and probably not in a good way. Readers may recall that we took note of a ban on shipments of rare earths raw materials to Japan, which in many ways was also a shot across the US bow. Even though so-called rare earths are not that […]
Read more...In our escalating currency (really trade) dispute with China, many people argue that China holds the whip hand because it would quit buying US bonds. As we’ve explained repeatedly, that’s the last thing China would do, since stopping buying US debt (or more accurately, US dollars which it then moves into higher yielding assets than […]
Read more...By Kalpa, who blogs at big picture agriculture. Kalpa’s formal education was in medicine, science, and the humanities. Having seen the destruction that industrial agriculture has done to the biosystem of the Midwestern Plains, where she grew up, she writes on the comprehensive picture of economics in agriculture, ag science, ag policy, food security, energy, […]
Read more...The end of the US summer holiday period is upon us, and with it, a return to reality. The markets are again concerned re Eurobanks, as the fears registered in EU periphery country bond spreads are now registering with investors in other markets. Per Bloomberg: The gaps between 10- year German bond yields and those […]
Read more...News is preliminary, no idea yet whether it is a production well or not, but all 13 crew members on the Mariner Energy rig are accounted for. The Journal’s story here (which presumably will be updated); Bloomberg’s here.
Read more...The very minute the Paul Volcker, who proposed the sound idea that government backstopped banks not engage in proprietary trading, said that trades done on behalf of customers were meant to be excluded from this proposal, anyone familiar with trading could see he’d just deep sixed his idea. Proprietary trading existed LONG before banks decided […]
Read more...Even in this TARP and Fed supported, “heads I win, tails you lose” of the banking industry, the “you live by the sword, you die by the sword” element has not been entirely removed. Witness the schadenfreude-gratifying distress at JP Morgan’s commodities unit, headed by Blythe Masters (a supersaleswoman who has already gotten a fair […]
Read more...A breaking story at the Washington Post, based on a new analysis of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, puts the total at 4.9 million barrels: BP’s Macondo well spewed 62,000 barrels of oil a day initially, and as the reservoir gradually depleted itself the flow eased to 53,000 barrels a day until the well was […]
Read more...It looks as if Team Obama has reverted to form. In a repeat of its perfromance post the financial crisis, it appears to believe that no problem cannot be solved by PR, which puts it in league with the perps. Hat tip Glenn Stehle:
Read more...Readers may recall that we harped on BP’s refusal to try to contain oil around the site of the leak, and later, its failure to do proper booming to contain and remove oil and so reduce the amount that came ashore (note that the US also failed abjectly as a second line of defense; the […]
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