What’s Going on With This Blog?

~~By InsightAnalytical-GRL

UPDATE: October 28, 2009

I continue to be swamped but am trying to post interesting tidbits I find along the way as I try to salvage my economic future.  Don’t forget to check out the section of the blogroll that is full of useful links: Economic News/Analysis/Contrarian Blogs.

Yuan on the Way to Becoming an Alternative Reserve Currency & Obama’s Off to China to INSIST That the Chinese Play Nice

~~By InsightAnalytical-GRL

OK, here we go again, in all likelihood, with another big blast of hot air from Barack Obama.

Reuters, like the AP, doesn’t appreciate quoting from their articles.  So, for details follow the link from 11/10/2009:

World Bank: yuan to become alternative reserve currency

Let’s summarize.  Former Bush Adminstration biggie Robert Zoellick who has moved on to become President of the World Bank thinks the dollar as a reserve currency is “relatively secure” but the Chinese yuan is going to become an alternative to the greenback. Zoellick muses that it might take 10-15 years and that we shouldn’t be “complacent” about the dollar.

As if anybody these days is complacent???  And, don’t you think that these comments just confirm the actions of Ben Bernanke and the Fed that are allowing the dollar fall?

Goldman Sachs Chairman & CEO Says Company Is Part of a “Virtuous Cycle” With a “Social Purpose” Even as It Apparently Moves Markets in “Miraculous” Ways (SEC, Where Are You?)

~~By InsightAnalytical-GRL

A couple of weeks ago we brought you this little ditty about how some executive at Goldman Sachs explained how moral the marketplace is (See: This Would Be the Laugh of the Day if It Weren’t So Aggravating: Pious Rationalizations About “Morality in the Marketplace” from Our Buddies at Goldman Sachs (Posted 10/21/2009). 

Goldman Sachs’s Griffiths Says Inequality Helps All

A Goldman Sachs International adviser defended compensation in the finance industry as his company plans a near-record year for pay, saying the spending will help boost the economy.

“We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” Brian Griffiths, who was a special adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said yesterday at a panel discussion at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The panel’s discussion topic was, “What is the place of morality in the marketplace?”

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., based in New York, set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $527,192 for the period. The amount set aside this year is just shy of the all-time high $16.9 billion allocated in the first three quarters of 2007. Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally in New York declined to comment.  (MORE)

Now, we’re in for ANOTHER treat from the grand poobahs at Goldman…From The Sunday Times (U.K.) profile on Goldman’s chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein:

November 8, 2009

I’m doing ‘God’s work’. Meet Mr Goldman Sachs

John Arlidge

…

Luckily for him and his firm, he’s a damn good salesman. He starts with a little humility. He understands that “people are pissed off, mad, and bent out of shape” at bankers’ actions. Goldman played its part in the meltdown that almost destroyed the global financial system. It, like most other banks, lent too much money, made its first quarterly loss for more than a decade last year and ended up taking bail-out cash from Washington. “I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” he says. But then, he slowly begins to argue the case for modern banking. “We’re very important,” he says, abandoning self-flagellation. “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.” To drive home his point, he makes a remarkably bold claim. “We have a social purpose.”

Social purpose? Those who have lost their jobs or seen their pay slashed thanks to bankers who flogged dodgy mortgages and dreamt up investments so complex not even they understood them, would gladly tell him where to stick his social purpose…

This piece goes on for 7 web pages and gets deep into the secretive Goldman Sach spider web and its political force, so it’s worth taking your time to rummage through it all.

Meanwhile, over at one of my favorite sites, Chris Martenson has been doing some analysis in a piece out on 11/6/200 titled “Market Recap – Ridiculous Productivity“. The start of the piece takes a look at Goldman Sach’s pattern of amazing level of investment success in the current financial markets (italics mine). (And, just for the record, Goldman Sachs profit last quarter was $3.2 billion and the average pay of the 30,000 on staff is going to be around $700,000 this year with top earners making LOTS more…)

After digging around and sifting through the things both said and not said, I have come to the conclusion that what we are seeing are the likely effects of a rescue operation.

By this I mean a large injection of stabilizing cash to one or more parties, possibly related to the recent large bankruptcies.  Two of my friends, who have been actively trading for more than 20 years between them, threw in the towel this week, as their patterns and methods are no longer working.

Their conclusion is the same as mine; this market is not trading like it used to.  It is trading chaotically, counterintuitively, and as if there’s some sort of distorting influence involved.

First, we might just wonder if this isn’t the impact of a rogue firm with entirely too much power moving the market for its own benefit.

When we examine the results of Goldman’s latest quarterly trading results, obviously we have a strong suspect.

He quotes from a piece discussing how Goldman Benefits from Trading Bonanza and concludes:

Only one day with trading losses out of the entire quarter?  A 98.5% win-rate?  Sorry folks, this is so far beyond the realm of statistically possible that we must search for other reasons.  There can be no doubt that Goldman is enjoying an advantage not shared by the rest of the market.

He has a chart up which shows some of the shenaigans in the market following certain data reports.  But there’s one market move in particular that seems to have resulted from perhaps a bit of advance knowledge?

We see the volatility as the market first surged on the GDP report and then slumped the day after.  Then there was a spike on the ISM (mfg) data that also gave up the gains shortly thereafter.  Then we had the FOMC follies where the market looked like an EKG of a heart attack victim for a while before finally slumping away all the day’s gains.Today’s [Friday, November 6] 200 point Dow spree was said to be due to favorable unemployment data and excellent productivity gains, but if you were watching the overnight futures, you noticed that the lift-off actually began at 3:00 a.m.  As a trader, I am quite familiar with this pattern.  When large futures gains are recorded beginning at 3:00, you can nearly always count on those gains holding through the day.

Inquiring minds would like to know how the future traders seemingly know about the excellent economic news that has not yet been released.  Hello, SEC?  I have a job for you.

Well, apparently, part of doing God’s work involves getting a nice leg-up so that markets can move in miraculous ways.

It’s clear that while Goldman Sachs is apparently the OTHER “chosen one” (with Barack Obama the one placed in the White House), the rest of us who are trying to restore our personal wealth so that we’ll be able to eat during our golden years are plainly stuck somewhere near hell…

Globalization/U.S. Decline Right on Schedule Courtesy Obama Backdown…Summer 2010 Projected Completion of Integration of NAFTA with EU to Counter BRIC/ASEAN Bloc

~~By InsightAnalytical-GRL

A couple of days ago I posted some thoughts on “Globalization in Pictures: Courtesy AT & T”.

Then I stumbled across an update of a something far more “under the radar” that I had found back in March of 2009. See below for the link to that post, specifically the section titled “Canada-EU Free Trade?”

The gist of that tidbit from March follows:

Friday I received the daily newsletter from Radio Canada International and once again there were squibs included that I couldn’t find at either the RCI site or when I searched around the CBC’s news area.

Read these with an eye to several posts that will be starting tomorrow, with American Lassies’s post entitled “THE PROPOSED NORTH AMERICAN COMMUNITY/NORTH AMERICAN UNION: 2010 Is Just Around the Corner.”

OTTAWA: CANADA, EU AGREE ON FREE-TRADE AGENDA

Canada and the European Union have agreed on a framework for negotiation of a free-trade accord after six months of discussions. Canadian Trade Minister Stockwell Day says the two parties will discuss goods and services, investment rules, intellectual property and free circulation of workers. The minister says Canada’s provinces will take part in the negotiations. Bilateral trade last year was worth $90 billion, an increase of seven per cent over 2007.

***

Well, guess what? Things have been moving along…and  include MORE than Canada and the EU.

From Fortune at money.cnn.com:

Plotting the biggest trade deal of the 21st century

Tax-free Champagne, anyone?

European and North American politicians are plotting the biggest trade deal of the 21st century: a $35 trillion, duty-free region encompassing the E.U., the U.S., Canada, and Mexico

by Erik Heinrich, contributor

Last Updated: October 29, 2009: 2:17 PM ET

TORONTO (Fortune) — Not even Franz Kafka could have dreamed this one up.

This past spring, prime ministers Stephen Harper of Canada and Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic met with European Union mandarins from Brussels. The setting was Prague’s medieval castle — made famous by Kafka in what is perhaps the darkest novel in his moody oeuvre — where they hatched a plan for the biggest free-trade deal of the 21st century.

How could a development of this magnitude result from a fairly routine conference between Canada and the EU? (At the time, the Czech Republic was responsible for the trading bloc’s presidency, which rotates between member states every six months.) The short answer is that after decades of spinning their wheels, Canada and the EU finally agreed to begin negotiating a free-trade agreement (FTA).

Immediately after declaring these talks as “hatching” the plans for “the biggest free-trade deal of the 21st century,” the reporter immediately shifts gears:

That’s far from a Bond-villain plot for world domination. But fast forward to last week in Ottawa, Canada, where the first round of Canada-EU negotiations reached a successful conclusion, with both sides optimistic that a deal can be signed as early as the summer of 2010.

Wow, I’m so relieved! No “plot for world domination” here!

But it all boils down to trying to save the neck of the U.S. apparently (my bolding):

When that happens, a push will begin for the ultimate goal behind the Prague agreement: a NAFTA-EU trade zone to counterbalance the growing economic power of Fortress Asia, and the ascendancy of the so-call BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) group of countries.

“The U.S. will lose its leadership position in trade unless it comes up with a new strategy,” says Steven Schrage, a specialist in international business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. “It makes sense to integrate NAFTA with the EU.”

Annual two-way trade between Canada and EU is about $100 billion, less than 20% of the total between Canada and the U.S. under NAFTA. But a trans-Atlantic NAFTA-EU trade zone would encompass nearly 1 billion people and account for $35.2 trillion in annual GDP, more than half the world’s total.

The article continues by noting that  China, India, and the 10 ASEAN nations (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) are “not standing still.” Our buddies at Goldman Sachs opine that “by 2050 the world’s three biggest economies will be China, the U.S. and India in that order, compared to the U.S., Japan and Germany today. That represents a clear shift away from the G7.”

A NAFTA-EU trade deal may get stiff opposition here in the U.S.  Why?

However with protectionist sentiment in the U.S. gaining momentum, helped in part by President Obama’s controversial Buy-American position, getting the world’s biggest economy to expand its free-trade frontier could be an uphill battle. At least for the near term.

But wait a minute…

Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic provided a transcript of Obama’s musings in his piece of February 3, 2009 titled  Obama Wants “Buy American” Out Of Stimulus Bill and you can find more stories on the “back down” below!

So, the Fortune report seems to have “forgotten” what went on in February.  Which begs the question–how “uphill” will be this “battle” to integrate NAFTA with the EU in the “near term”?

In my last post I listeda series of posts related to globalization and here’s the link to the post by American Lassie titled  THE PROPOSED NORTH AMERICAN COMMUNITY/NORTH AMERICAN UNION: 2010 Is Just Around the Corner (March 9, 2009) that was mentioned above.

So, do you think all this NAFTA-EU “conflict” will be settled sometime next year?

Well, silly me!  The Fortune article actually informs us that “both sides optimistic that a deal can be signed as early as the summer of 2010.”

DUH!

Everything right on schedule!!!

***

Related Post on Canada-EU Free Trade from March 2009:

The Past Week: March 1-7, 2009 (More on Sinclair Lewis; Canada-EU Free Trade?; China Eyeing the Big Three Automakers’ “Juicy Bits”?; Palin’s “Troopergate” Foe Winds Up In Obama Administration)

Related Posts from February 2009 on Obama’s backdown on “Buy America”:

President Obama to water down ‘Buy American’ plan after EU trade war threat (The Times, UK)

Obama backs down over ‘Buy America’ after EU warns him not to start a global trade war (Daily Mail, UK)

Don’t worry about ‘Buy American’: Obama (Rediff India Abroad)

Globalization in Pictures: Courtesy AT & T

By InsightAnalytical-GRL

Since I seem to be always thinking about the demise of the dollar and the march of power and wealth to the East (China, in particular, with India and other S. E. Asian countries joining in the fun), this flyer really reminded me of what’s going on a lot closer to home.

We’ve discussed in the past the “North American Union” scenario and things like that “super highway” plan and the new Mexican seaport which will probably hurt West Coast ports.  Drug cartels are now talked about all the time.

But the ad I received yesterday really was so “in your face” that I couldn’t resist sharing it with you.

AT & T is one of those companies that is billed as a safe-haven investment during this rough economic time, offering some growth and dividends to help increase a retiree’s income.  It’s American as apple pie…but, like most multinational corporations, it’s “reaching out to touch someone” somewhere else bigtime.

Living about 50 miles from the Mexican border, I have to say that I enjoy the food (eat salsa every day, tortillas constantly, and do green chile) and the many lovely Mexican immigrants and long-time citizens  that I’ve met over the last decade. We’ve got about 5 Spanish television stations and the radio is full of Mexican music from here and directly from Mexico, which is really fun to listen to (sort of like polkas in Spanish!). I know lot of folks who cross the ordeer for affordable dental care and I’ve visited a Mexican pharmacy myself. The culture is wonderful and the people are warm and friendly, but, of course, the poor from the other side of the border want to come here.  I’ve met women who’ve left their families to come here in the hopes of being able to send money home and also to escape extreme poverty and danger.

Even the local Walmart features  several services to send money to Mexico.

This is the way it is, a fact of life in these parts. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having lots of cross-border activity…heck, if we were in Europe it would be exactly the same thing.  I recall visiting the Gallup Organization in London when I was working for the parent company in Princeton, N.J. years ago (before it was sold to a big outfit) and how fascinated I was that one of the women in the same job there that I had in the U.S. was prepping for a trip to about 5 countries as if it were nothing out of the ordinary…sort of like the way I prepped to do a big job out in California, I guess.

It’s just that normal back and forth has been supplanted by something a lot more complicated than families visiting relatives. We’re now in globalization mode and it’s on steroids.

And here’s what AT & T is marketing to exploit the situation…

Outside of the AT & T advertising...

And, when you open it up, there’s a pop-up, just like one of those children’s picture books with pop-up pages:

A pop-up ruin...

I don’t have relatives in Mexico but I know people who do. I hope it helps them to stay close to them via phone and enables them to save money.

But, still…it does show how the globalization train is pretty far down the tracks, at least in these parts…

***

Related Posts

El Paso Media Conference Pushes “Newspapers as Change Agents”; Interesting Background of Organizer (February 20, 2009)

Secy. of Defense Robert Gates Downplays Possible U.S. Role as Fears of Mexico Collapse Mount; Don’t Be Fooled, There’s A Bush-Era Agenda Still Going On Here… (March 6, 2009)

THE PROPOSED NORTH AMERICAN COMMUNITY/NORTH AMERICAN UNION: 2010 Is Just Around the Corner (March 9, 2009)

What’s Going On North of the Border: The Canadian Economy and Stimulus Plan (March 11,2009)

Mexico Plans World’s Third Largest Seaport, Will Impact U.S. Ports on West Coast; Citigroup to Help Finance? (Updated 1X More on TARP $$ Going Overseas) (March 12, 2009)

Obama on the Border: The Language Shift & Plan to Use Executive Orders–Tying It All Together (Security, Trade, Immigration ) (March 13, 2009)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the North American Union: A Layman’s Overview of the Coming New World Order (March 17, 2009–by Grail Guardian)

You Know Things Are Bad When….the Mortgage Bankers Association Puts THIS On Sale….

~~By InsightAnalytical-GRL

The Washington Business Journal is reporting that the MBA is putting it’s nearly-new headquarters building up for sale:

MBA puts new headquarters up for sale – Washington Business Journal

The Mortgage Bankers Association is putting its new downtown headquarters building up for sale, citing the economic downturn.

The MBA’s headquarters, a 170,000-square-foot, 10- story building at 1331 L St. NW, was completed in the summer of 2008.

Spiffy "green" MBA Headquarters

The Association’s chief executive officer has decided that it would be “imprudent” to hang onto the building, which is one of a very few in Washington D.C. that meets “green” building standards:

“Since its purchase in May 2008, the U.S. economy has suffered one of the most severe recessions in a century, and the residential and commercial real estate markets have deteriorated,” said MBA chief executive John Courson in a letter to members.“ These factors, coupled with a challenging leasing environment, led the MBA board to conclude that continued ownership of 1331 L Street was economically imprudent, and over the long term would impair MBA’s ability to continue providing out members with MBA’s full range of services.”

I”m not exactly what services they provide to members, but I hope they’re giving them free lessons on how NOT to make crummy loans…

…’Nuff said…