The on-site commander has requested 40,000 additional troops. According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama will announce an increase of about 30,000 tomorrow at West Point. Notably, he seems ready to reject a second high priority of Gen. McChrystal: a doubling of the Afghan police and army over the next few years. The New York [...]
News from around the world
From the Guardian.co.uk: The Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange has finished the trading day for Monday, and it was not pretty
The Exchange was down 83%, losing 241.92 to close at 2668.23.
Royal Bank of Scotland is already down 4% today on concerns about its loans to Dubai World
The Washington Post reports that there [...]
Now I am not nor ever have been a Lou Dobbs fan. And the first three segments of his interview with John Daily were kind of uninspiring. But this last segment was pretty good; a rational setting of bounds that we need to set and keep if want to keep our way of life alive.
See [...]
The developing debt crisis in Dubai (yet another financial bubble about to break) has the UK Financial Services Authority “urgently seeking assurances that Britain’s major banks are protected…” reports the Guardian this morning. The Authority is demanding open disclosure of exposure while the Bank of England and the Treasury continue to monitor closely.
Banks mentioned with [...]
Happy Thanksgiving to all of you serving in the armed forces today, and to all of those who served in the past. I read the other day that there is only one living veteran of WWI in the U.S. – to him, as special thank you and best wishes for another year.
December is a tough [...]
Dubai World
Dubai World, the government owned enterprise for developing Dubai, shocked international markets yesterday by asking to delay some debt payments. http://preview.tinyurl.com/ydutgdm. According to the Guardian’s ariticle,
The FTSE 100 tumbled by 70 points, or nearly 1.4%, to 5123 when trading began. But with share prices volatile, it clawed back most of the losses by 10am, [...]
I hope all of you have a wonderful day with family and friends today.
One thing to think about, and maybe discuss at the table: are we going broke as a nation?
Martin Sullivan makes a compelling case in “Who’s Afraid of Risky Government Debt?”
He covers no less than 4 articles this morning in major newspapers on [...]
Wall Street Journal reports further decline in lending
“US lenders saw loans fall by the largest amount since the govenment began tracking such data, suggesting that nervousness among banks continues to hamper economic recovery.”
Lending fell by 3%, or $210.4 billion, the largest decline since data collection started back in 1984. The FDIC also admits that its [...]
For those of you who still read and do not get all your news from the blithering idiots reading news on talk radio, you may want to spend the next couple of days reading about climategate. Hear’s the basic problem: while the evidence does point to humankind having an impact on the earth, it is [...]
See my earlier post at http://magort.com/?p=45 on the amazing bubble machine that Goldman Sachs has developed to rip off investors. Sometimes you have to go off shore to find good coverage. Today’s Guardian (the UK’s “Independent” newspaper) has a great article:
Shareholders demand Goldman bonuses
Institutional investors are going after Goldman to “claw back” its outrageous bonuses [...]