Saturday, January 18, 2014

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • U.S. Consumer sentiment declined in January, falling to a reading of 80.4 from 82.5 in December.
  • December U.S. industrial production rose 0.3%
  • Construction on new U.S. homes fell 9.8% in December, pulling back after a surge in November

  • Jerry Brown  will use a morning news conference in San Francisco on Friday to declare a drought emergency amid one of the driest winters on record

  • Intel said the chip giant had "a solid fourth quarter with signs of stabilization in the PC segment," shares were down more than 3% after-hours.
  • (MarketWatch) - Intel Corp. was upgraded to overweight from neutral by J.P. Morgan analyst Christopher Danely who said he was "making a leap of faith" on PCs in 2014 and the chip giant's new Chief Executive Brian Krzanich.

  • The caffeine equivalent to that in two cups of coffee can boost performance on a memory test.

  • The World Bank raised its global growth forecasts as the easing of austerity policies in advanced economies supports their recovery, boosting prospects for developing markets' exports.

  • Brussels is demanding that even foreigners who have never worked in Germany should have access to the country's unemployment benefits if they hail from an EU member state. The EU is firing Germany's already overheated immigration debate.

  • Confidence in Australia's property and construction industry has surged to a new record high

  • (Reuters) - U.S. municipal bond funds reported $103.3 million of net inflows in the week ended January 15, compared with $19 million in outflows in the previous week


  • YoY China’s M2 Money supply rose 13.6%
  • Property prices in China ended 2013 still red hot despite repeated government efforts to cool the sector, but the rises are expected to soften this year as more targeted curbs come into place
  • Twenty years ago, China exported six cars. Last year it exported a million.

  • Paramount will stop releasing major motion pictures on 35-millimeter film, becoming the first big Hollywood studio to go digital-only.


  • (Reuters) - President Barack Obama banned U.S. eavesdropping on the leaders of close friends and allies on Friday and began reining in the vast collection of Americans' phone data in a series of limited reforms triggered by Edward Snowden's revelations.

  • Standard & Poor's raised the outlook on California's ratings to positive from stable and affirmed the state's 'A' long-term rating.

  • KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) A mosquito-borne virus appears to be spreading quickly in the Caribbean during the winter tourism season just weeks after epidemiologists first found local transmission occurring in the French dependency of St. Martin. Scientists said that St. Martin now has as many as 200 cases of chikungunya, a virus found mainly in Africa and Asia that can cause a debilitating but rarely fatal sickness with fever, rash, fatigue and intense muscle and joint pain.


  • Italian joblessness has hit a fresh high of 12.7% in November, up from October’s 12.5% and the highest on record. Youth unemployment, at 41.6%, is also at an all-time high.

  • A new memo has emerged that provides clear evidence that in 1976 Kissinger gave Argentina's neo-fascist military junta the "green light" for the dirty war it was conducting against civilian and militant leftists that resulted in the disappearance—that is, deaths—of an estimated 30,000 people.

Sunday, January 05, 2014

QUICK OVERVIEW


  • NSA's Secret Toolbox: Unit Offers Spy Gadgets for Every Need. The NSA has a secret unit that produces special equipment ranging from spyware for computers and cell phones to listening posts and USB sticks that work as bugging devices. Here are some excerpts from the intelligence agency's own catalog.

  • In an unprecedented ruling, a judge reviewing whether Xcel Energy should invest in new natural gas generators vs. large solar power arrays concluded Tuesday that solar is a better deal.

  • From an Associated Press-GfK stock market poll. Of the people polled, 40% think the market will stabilize where it is now by the end of 2014, with 39% predicting that it will drop, but not crash. Only 14 % believe the market will rise and 5 percent think it will crash.

  • Pending sales of homes ticked up in November, the first gain in six months, signaling that upcoming activity may rise, the National Association of Realtors reported Monday. The index of pending home sales increased 0.2% last month to 101.7, slightly above a 10-month low of 101.5 in October, but down from 103.3 in November 2012.

  • Temperatures in parts of Australia are set to reach almost 50C /122F in the coming days, with total fire bans in place in northern regions of South Australia and a week-long heat wave enveloping Queensland.
  • (Reuters) - Many parts of the U.S. Midwest braced for a blast of Arctic air this weekend that could bring some of the coldest temperatures in two decades..

Saturday, January 04, 2014

Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions "There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world," climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado said. "But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two."

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Sunday, December 15, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • (Reuters) - Investors in U.S.-based funds pulled $6.5 billion out of stock mutual funds in the week ended Wednesday, marking the biggest weekly outflows this year, on worries the U.S. Federal Reserve could scale back its bond purchases as soon as next week..

  • Fu Shou Yuan, a chain of Chinese high-end graveyards, prices its $215m IPO at the top of its range, with the retail investor portion 670 times oversubscribed..
  • China's extreme smog is forcing pilots to train for blind landings.

  • The European Parliament has approved a series of crucial rules and steps towards the eventual completion of a “Banking” Union designed to close down failed banks in order to prevent banking crises. Under the terms, the cost of closing down a euro zone bank will initially be borne almost fully by its home country, but the obligations of euro zone partners will gradually rise to be shared equitably after 10 years.

  • The U.S. household unemployment rate fell to a five-year low of 7 percent and nonfarm payrolls rose by 203,000 in November in a strong jobs report
  • The U.S. economy grew at a 3.6% annual rate in the third quarter, faster than first reported and its strongest performance in 1 1/2 years.

  • ALEC calls for penalties on 'freerider' homeowners in assault on clean energy In a sign of the influence the network holds with Republicans, it will be addressed by rising stars of the party including US senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who led the push for the recent government shutdown, and the party's budget guru, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

  • Canada’s household debt rose to 163.7 % of disposable income in Q3, compared with 163.1 percent in the previous quarter. Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz said that household debt represents the biggest threat to the Canadian economy, suggesting that he'd be cutting interest rates if he weren't worried of fueling more borrowing in a time of near record-high levels of household debt and an overheated housing market.

  • The ICCO raised the cocoa production deficit to 160,000 from 52,000 tons. "World production of cocoa beans is now expected to be significantly lower than previously envisaged," the ICCO said, cutting its forecast for world output by 55,000 tons to 3.99m tons. Consumption was raised by 54,000 tonnes to 4.05m tonnes.

  • Disney (DIS) raised the dividend by 15% to $0.86 Per Share

  • Czarnikow said demand for sugar will gain 2.5 % this year, the biggest rate of growth since 2008, when global consumption rose 3.5%.

  • In 2002, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimated that communication towers kill 4 million to 5 million birds per year, cars kill roughly 60 million, and cats kill hundreds of millions.

  • The Chinese government said that it landed an unmanned space probe on the moon, joining the U.S. and Russia as the only nations to accomplish the feat.

  • J.P Morgan lowered its forecasts on gold prices by 10% to $1,263 an ounce for 2014 and by 12% to $1,275 for 2015.

Saturday, November 30, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • The pending U.S. home sales index fell 0.6% to 102.1 and dropped to its lowest level since last December, the National Association of Realtors said.
  • Because of the 16-day republican/tea instigated government shutdown, sales of U.S. Existing Homes dropped 3.2% to a 5.12 million annual rate, the fewest since June.

  • Eurozone jobless rate stands at 12.1% in Oct.

  • Israeli stock prices rose to another record high last Sunday, ignoring local politicians' comments that a deal to curb Iran's nuclear program was a mistake.

  • European Central Bank member Joerg Asmussen said the ECB, which cut interest rates to a record low earlier, was ready to take further action if necessary and instruments at its disposal included negative deposit rates.

  • Ukraine bowing to pressure from Russia is the first major defeat for the EU in its eastward march since the fall of Communism.

  • Swiss vote down plan to cap salaries of top executives.

  • China and Japan appeared to be a step closer to a military confrontation that could drag in the United States, after Beijing extended its air-defense zone over a group of islands that is also claimed by Tokyo..

  • Japan's central bank kept its ultra-loose monetary policy in place and says the economy is on track for a "moderate recovery”.
  • YoY Japan's consumer prices increased by 0.9% in October, marking the fastest growth in five years and signaling possible exit from deflation.

  • U.S. regulators are considering whether to give banks more time to comply with the Volcker rule, which bans them from gambling with their own money, Fed Vice-Chair Janet Yellen said.

  • The equation is simple: (more U.S. imports) = (fewer U.S. jobs) A report by the Economic Policy Institute estimates that America's trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2011 eliminated a net 2.7 million U.S. jobs.

  • India's July-Sept. GDP grew 4.8 %

  • Bloomberg forecasts China to pass India in Gold purchases and projects a 29% growth in Chinas gold purchase for 2013.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • The European Commission has exercised historic new EU powers allowing it to revise national budgets for the first time.

  • (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives passed a controversial bill on Tuesday that would delay two government regulators from adopting rules requiring stock brokers and retirement account financial advisers to put their customers' interests ahead of their own.

  • (USA Today) Most Americans say past global warming has been caused largely by human activities — ranging from a low of 65% in Utah to a high of 92% in Rhode Island. Most also back government curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants — from 62% in Utah to 90% in New Hampshire.

  • (Reuters) - Carbon dioxide injected into oil and gas wells may have caused a series of minor earthquakes in Texas long before the adoption of current hydraulic fracking.

  • Deforestation in the Amazon increased by nearly a third over the past year, according to Brazilian government figures released on Thursday.

  • The Environmental Protection Agency proposed to reduce the amount of ethanol in the nation's fuel supply for the first time. December corn fell 4.5 cents, or 1.1 percent, to $4.22 a bushel.

  • Australia’s central bank left its benchmark interest rate unchanged at a record low and said a lower currency will be needed to achieve balanced growth.

  • Crime rates will soar, economies will stagnate and Europe's social fabric will deteriorate if policymakers do not act to address youth unemployment, World Economic Forum report warns.

  • General Electric Co (GE) will spin off its credit card business next year into a separately traded company as it tries to reduce its exposure to unpredictable financial businesses and return to its manufacturing roots.

  • In Q3 Windows Phone accounted for nearly 10 % of all Smartphone sales in the EU 5 (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom), research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said. That's a double YoY - largely due to sales of Nokia's Lumia handsets.

  • The board of directors of Kimberly-Clark (KMB) has proposed a spin-off of its healthcare business in order to focus on its consumer and professional brands.

Sunday, November 03, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW


  • The Chicago purchasing managers index rose to 65.9% in October, the best performance since March 2011.

  • At $680 billion, the U.S. federal government's latest annual deficit is the smallest since 2008.


  • U.S. home prices posted their strongest gain in August for more than seven years, according to S&P/ Case-Shiller Home Price Indices the 10-City and 20-City Composites posted a 12.8% growth rate YoY, the highest increases since February 2006.

  • Starbuck’s raised its quarterly dividend 24% to 26 cents a share.

  • Eurozone's CPI is at a 4-year low in September

  • Spain Retail Sales (YoY) improves to 2.2% in September from -4.5% in August

  • Iran's inflation hits 36.2%


  • World Bank: ‏Over the next 20 yrs, South Asia countries will add 1 million new people to the global labor force every month.

  • YoY Asia's cocoa grindings rose 12% to 161,097 tonnes in Q3, while North American cocoa grindings rose 8.25% to their highest since at least 2009.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • (NYT) China has become shrill in its criticism of the fiscal train wreck in the United States, arguing that the answer to a potential government default is to begin creating a “de-Americanized world.”..
  • Fitch placed the triple A credit rating of the US on negative watch.
  • One-month Treasury bills maturing on October 31 shot up 21 basis points to a new debt ceiling peak of 53 bps

  • Brazil raised rates for fifth straight time since April bringing it close to double digits.

  • The International Cocoa Organization is lifting its forecast for a Cocoa  deficit to 86,000 tons. It warned, "We are going to be in a deficit for the next four years, but closer to 50,000 to 60,000 tons".

  • Accepting USDA's soybean numbers puts stocks to use at 4.5%; one of the tightest on record, with a very tight 2013-14 balance sheet

  • Microsoft received 37,196 requests for user data from law enforcement agencies during the first six months of 2013.

  • (Esquire} The War on Drugs Is Over. Drugs Won "The war on drugs could not have been a bigger failure. To sum up their most important findings, the average purity of heroin and cocaine has increased, respectively, 60% and 11% between 1990 and 2007. Cannabis purity is up a whopping 161% over that same time"

Sunday, September 22, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • Obama urged Republican/Tea to stop political brinkmanship on gov't funding and debt limit in order to avert self-inflicted wounds to economy.

  • The Dow and S&P 500 set record highs on Fed's "no taper" decision.

  • MoM existing U.S. Home Sales Beat Expectations rising 1.7% September

  • US Philly Fed business index 22.3vs 10.0 exp

  • (Reuters) - China could import 20-30 million tonnes of corn a year to cover growing supply shortages, a researcher with a government think tank said on Thursday, as much as four times current levels.

  • (Bloomberg) Global cocoa demand will outstrip supply by 209,000 metric tons in the season ending Sept. 30, estimates KnowledgeCharts, a unit of Commodities Risk Analysis in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. That is bigger than the 52,000-ton deficit forecast by the International Cocoa Organization in London. The shortage next season will amount to 188,000 tons.

  • 27% of Americans say now is a good time to find a quality job, up from 21 % in August. The figure is the highest since January 2008. At the same time, lower-income Americans' optimism has faded; with 19% saying now is a good time to find a quality job.


  • The US National Security Agency (NSA) has posted an ad for a "Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer".

  • The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed limits on carbon pollution from new fossil fuel (coal) power plants. The move, if successful, would be the first major step by the U.S. to limit greenhouse gas emissions from this sector.

  • The Czech Republic became the latest EU member to denounce subsidies for clean but costly renewable energy and pledged to double down on its use of fossil fuels.

  • Results from a referendum in the southern Swiss canton of Ticino showed that 65% of the electorate backed a proposal to forbid the covering of faces in public areas by any group.

  • The Sunday Assembly—the London-based “Atheist Church” grew at 3,000% since January, a rate that might make this non-religious Assembly the fastest growing church in the world”.

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Sunday, September 01, 2013

Jerry Brown's Tough-Love California Miracle "He preceded Al Gore," says Tom Hayden, the counterculture icon whom Brown appointed as the first chairman of his solar-energy council. "He's out there with solar beanies and rooftop collectors, and it's 1974 and people think he's a lunatic."

   “But I’ m not habituated – I disrupt my own thought pattern every day. I have learned to disbelieve almost everything I think!”

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • MoM U.S. consumer sentiment declined to 82.1 from July’s 85.1.
  • Chicago PMI rose to 53.0 from 52.3 in July.
  • Consumer spending barely rose in July, the first month of the third quarter, indicating little change in the U.S. economy's mild pace of growth.

  • China returning to full speed? China official manufacturing PMI rises to 51 in August a 16 month high.

  • The United States' High Plains Aquifer — a vast underground reservoir that stretches through eight states, from South Dakota to Texas, and supplies 30 percent of the nation's irrigated groundwater — could be used up within 50 years, unless current water use is reduced, a new study finds.

  • NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails The NSA is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second… But ask the NSA, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology…
  • However, a document seen by SPIEGEL reveals that the NSA  spied successfully on the French Foreign Ministry and news broadcaster Al Jazeera - the technology worked fine.

  • The Most Efficient Health Care Systems in The World: among the 48 countries included in the Bloomberg study, the U.S. ranks 46th, outpacing just Serbia and Brazil - worse than China, Algeria, and Iran.

  • Radiation levels around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant are 18 times higher than previously thought, Japanese authorities have warned.

  • (MarketWatch) -- August was the worst outflow month in more than three years for U.S. exchange-traded products, according to preliminary data from No. 1 ETFs provider BlackRock Inc. U.S. ETFs saw $16.1 billion in redemptions through Thursday, representing the biggest outflow in one month since $17.1 billion exited in January 2010. The largest ETF was the main driver, as the SPDR S&P 500 endured $13 billion in August outflows, BlackRock said.

  • (Guardian) General patterns suggest that internet users in the UK deliberately access online pornography more frequently than they access all social networking sites put together..

  • (Reuters) - British manufacturers are planning the fastest increase in capital investment in the year ahead since before the financial crisis, a survey showed, suggesting the economy could be heading for a more balanced recovery.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • Purchases of new U.S. homes fell 13.4 % in July, the most in more than three year.

  • Consumer confidence in both the euro area and the European Union (EU) rose in August, from minus 17.4 in July to minus 15.6.

  • German economy expanded by 0.7% in Q2 of 2013 compared with the previous.

  • QoQ Britain's GDP rose by 0.7 % Eurozone PMI rises to 51.7 in August

  • Soybeans are focused on current weather forecasts (dry) and the perceptions that US production potential is sliding. More upside potential exists, but it is based on weather development.

  • On 8/12/13 Kochi Japan hit 41C (105.8F). That's the hottest temperature ever recorded in Japan.

  • India’s July exports rose 11.6% YoY

  • The Singapore-based Cocoa Association of Asia said that processing rose 2% to 153,792 metric YoY. Analysts and traders expected a decrease.
  • The European Cocoa Association said on July 15 that grindings rose 6.1% in Q2. Cocoa Demand will exceed output by 119,000 metric tons in the 12 months starting in October, the first shortage in four years, according to Macquarie Group. However, hedge fund bets on higher prices are near a five-year high..

  • The World Gold Council sees Q2 Global gold demand at 856.3 tons - down 12% YoY to a 4-year low on liquidation from gold ETFs.

  • (Spiegel) Most in Britain seem unconcerned about the mass surveillance carried out by its intelligence agency GCHQ. Even the intimidation tactics being used on the Guardian this week have caused little soul-searching. The reason is simple: Britons blindly and uncritically trust their secret service.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Wall Street's Biggest Institutions Are Testing Quantitative Software for Non-Quants

"You literally press a button, say 'run the study,' and then [Robotrage] uses cloud computing capacity – it allocates to you that capacity – and it runs the study for you,

Sunday, August 04, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • The US economy added 162,000 jobs in July, slightly below expectations, but the unemployment rate fell to 7.4 %.
  • U.S initial claims for jobless benefits fell by 19,000 to 326,000, the fewest since January 2008, from a revised figure of 345,000 for the previous week.
  • U.S. economy grew 1.7% in Q2 U.S. personal income rose 0.3 % in June, after a 0.4 % gain in May
  • U.S. personal consumption expenditures rose 0.5 % in June, after an increase of 0.2 % in May.
  • U.S. savings rate, personal saving as a % of disposable personal income, edged down to 4.4% in June from 4.6% in the previous month, but remained well above the 2.1% average savings rate for all of 2007 before the financial crisis.

  • The United States Trade Representative (USTR), to whom the White House has delegated the authority to veto ITC rulings, has decided to veto an early-June ITC ruling, which would otherwise have taken effect on Monday, to ban the importation of older iPhones and iPads into the United States market over a Samsung declared-essential patent

  • China's PMI for the manufacturing sector improved slightly to 50.3% in July from 50.1% in June, above the boom-bust line of 50% for 10 months in a row.
  • China's non-manufacturing PMI rebounds to 54.1 % in July

  • An advanced computer numerical control (CNC) machine tool was shipped to Germany from China in the country's first export of cutting-edge equipment to a developed economy.

  • Eurozone jobless rate remains at record high of 12.1% in June
  • Eurozone consumer price inflation stays at 1.6% in July

  • The British economy to grow 1.2% in 2013


  • The Danish Meteorological Institute is reporting that on Tuesday, July 30, the mercury rose to 25.9 C (78.6 F) at a station in Greenland, the highest temperature measured in the Arctic country since records began in 1958.

  • Saudi website editor gets 7 years in prison and 600 lashes.


  • A Swedish sociology professor named Stefan Svallfors has nominated NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Saturday, August 03, 2013

James Galbraith on Social Breakdown and Financial Stress in Europe  JG: I think that ultimately the decision on the future of Europe will be made in Germany, and Germany has to decide, does it want it or not? If it wants it, it has to take minimal steps to stabilize it on the same principles on which they stabilized the East, and on which they built the Federal Republic in the first place. And if they don’t want it, well, it will go away.
RS: I think even if they want it, they’re not going to stabilize it.
JG: In which case they’ll lose it, and then we can see what is left. But when it’s lost, Germany’s going to have the problem it had before of an appreciating currency, and an industry that quickly loses competitiveness, and there’ll be higher unemployment. And its markets will have collapsed and its debts won’t get paid.
Germany is not going to escape the consequences of this. Again, it’s a choice that Germans can, and I’m sure, will make. But what is necessary is to state clearly what the choice actually is.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Goldman Sachs aluminum scandal could roil financials and commodity prices this week ..Goldman and other financial players has cost American consumers more than $5 billion over the last three years..
Rolls-Royce Revives Age of Sail to Beat Fuel-Cost Surge: Freight Rolls-Royce Holdings Plc (RR/), best known for powering planes from Concorde to the Airbus superjumbo, is working on a modern-day clipper ship as it bets on emissions curbs to jack up bunker-fuel costs and herald a new age of sail.

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • The Group of 20 nations pledged on Saturday to put growth before austerity, seeking to revive a global economy.
  • The Group of Twenty (G20) nations will back a global taxation reform, which will help avoid double taxation.

  • German austerity chief, finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble has warned Greek leaders not to play with fire by pressing for fresh debt-relief. He urged Greeks not to back track from their painful austerity and reform path. What’s the problem? You Greek’s don’t like 28.2% unemployment - too high?

  • Investors, fearing that the end of the commodity super cycle of ever-rising prices are heightened by China’s slowdown, are heading for the exits.

  • U.S. Fed chief emphasizes bond purchases could yet be accelerated if economic recovery shows signs of faltering. Bernanke said there are three main reasons for the rise in longer-term interest rates, which he thought was relatively low. He cited better economic news as the first reason. "As investors see brighter prospects ahead, interest rates tend to rise," Second reason is probably the "unwinding of leverage, and the third reason, is related to the Fed's communications and market interpretations of Fed policy. "But I want to emphasize that none of that implies that monetary policy will be tighter at any time within the foreseeable future," he said.

  • Moody's Investors Service lifted its outlook on the U.S. government bond rating to stable from negative and reaffirmed the U.S. government's Aaa rating.

  • (FT) US banks have lost billions of dollars of paper profits on their securities portfolios as market interest rates rise. Data released by the Federal Reserve on Friday showed unrealised gains in these portfolios had plummeted from more than $40bn at the beginning of the year to about $6bn

  • The U.S. home builder sentiment index gained 6 points to 57 this month, the highest level since January of 2006, according to the National Association of Home Builders Any reading over 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as good rather than poor.
  • U.S Privately-owned housing starts in June dropped 9.9% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 836,000, its lowest level since August last year.

  • Wildfires are chewing through twice as many hectares a year on average in the US compared with 40 years ago, US Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell told a Senate hearing.

  • U.S. Automakers are thriving – Detroit however files for bankruptcy: U.S. automaker General Motors Co. said that it sold 4.85 million vehicles globally in the first half of 2013, up 3.9% YoY. "Can we help Detroit? We don't know," Vice President Joe Biden said in response to a reporter's question about a possible federal rescue.

  • Chinas Industrial Output rose 8.9% YoY
  • China Q2 GDP up 7.5 % YoY

  • Spain's public debt rose to 89.6% of GDP in May

  •  (Pritchard) If you think, China's Communist Party fully understands the mess it has created by ramping credit to 200pc of GDP and running the greatest investment bubble know to man, read its shockingly complacent response to warnings from the International Monetary Fund.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

With its 41-megapixel camera, (NOK) Nokia’s Lumia 1020 absolutely brings the wow factor, proving that Nokia can innovate with the very best - that it is a mobile force to be reckoned with!


Go to 37:30 of the presentation and check out the needle-in-a-haystack – Remarkable!

Saturday, July 06, 2013

QUICK OVERVIEW

  • Markets have overreacted to the likelihood that the U.S. Federal Reserve will taper its quantitative easing policy, or QE, HSBC said in its quarterly equity insights research released on Friday. "The lesson of history is that the first tightening in a cycle -- as long as it comes because risks to growth have diminished, not because of inflation or structural worries -- typically causes only a short-lived correction in stocks," the bank said.

  • The US figures showed the economy had gained nearly 200,000 jobs in June, and a revision of previous low estimates saw an extra 70,000 added in April and May. However, the unemployment rate stays unchanged at 7.6%.

  • Marine Le Pen vows to smash the existing order of Europe and break-up the Euro if she wins the next election.

  • Ukraine anticipates a 25% increase in wheat output this year

  • The European system of carbon trading has practically collapsed as politicians prioritize the economy over the environment.

  • The Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller home price index showed a 12% increase in prices in 20 cities from April 2012 to April 2013, the largest gain since early 2006, when home values began to level off in advance of the market collapse.

  • The IMF is preparing to suspend aid payments to Greece by the end of next month unless Eurozone leaders plug a €3bn-€4bn shortfall that has opened up in Greece’s €172bn rescue program.

  • Bernanke says US central bank could start slowing asset-purchase scheme later this year and end it by mid-2014.

  • Car sales are down 10% in Austria, France and Germany, and 47% in Romania. The European market has contracted by a quarter from its heyday before the debt crisis and the fiscal squeeze.

  • China's shadow banking system is out of control and under mounting stress as borrowers struggle to roll over short-term debts, Fitch Ratings has warned.

  • The CBO concludes that immigrants will generate additional tax payments over the next decade and reduce the U.S. deficit…

  • Several former Bank of America employees filed declarations in a federal court claiming the mortgage lender told them to lie to customers seeking loan modifications...

  • The flash HSBC China Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index fell to 48.3 in June from 49.2 in May, the weakest in nine months.

  • Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega said that the government will trim its 2013 budget by 15 billion reales (or 6.7 billion U.S. dollars).

  • According to the Italian central bank, national public debt reached 127% of gross domestic product (GDP) last year, up from 120.8% in 2011, placing the country second in the European Union (EU) after Greece.

  • A mother of seven, Ursula von der Leyen is Germany's labor minister and a role model for women juggling demanding careers with family commitments. In an interview, the 54-year-old has some advice for young people struggling to find work. How best to solve Europe's youth unemployment crisis? Make young people learn English.