Monday is a big day in the economy. Citibank will announce its earnings, and $5 billion in bonds to finance the TXU buyout go on sale from Citibank and JP Morgan / Chase. From the Wall Street Journal comes word of a new “pipeline” of money to help Citibank and its affiliates: The Master-Liquidity Enhancement […]
In the Marines we had a saying, terse and to the point as is the Jarhead way: “Bohica!”, it was an acronym that stood for “Bend over, here it comes again”. I direct your attention to two graphs that I shall explain: What this chart is showing you is the pricing of something called a […]
As most of you know from my earlier posts, I have been watching the stresses build in the global currency and credit markets. While most people have little idea what they are and why they are there, suffice to say in a world that is increasingly outsourcing things to each other, the exchange of money […]
This posting over at Colony Worlds argues that we’d be better off colonizing Ceres (the asteroid) before we colonize Mars: Ceres however is located within the “mineral field of dreams,” dancing around the sun between 2.5-3 AU (or astronomical units). This places the icy world in the heart of the metal rich zone, the majority […]
Ok, I am probably an old, partially insane intelligence junkie. But I wandered across this site that is devoted to old Soviet era propaganda and motivation posters. These things always fascinated me (the modern ones from China and North Korea still do), and this site, as you might expect, has one of them each day. […]
October is Wall Street’s least favorite month. The big drops in points tend to come in October, and it seems that the Wall Street insiders are smelling something coming in the wind. From Bloomberg: Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) — Skittishness over the U.S. stock market’s record-setting rally is reaching a crescendo among options traders who are […]
I’ve been following the coverage (little as there is) about Israel’s strike on an Syrian military site back on September 6th. There are several remarkable aspects to the strike and its aftermath: Israeli jets flew all the way across Syria to the site in question — which is by the Turkish border — and back […]
A few weeks ago the Fed massively cut rates, essentially stepping in to free up money that the banks and large investment firms could not or would not. Most observers would expect that the credit crisis had largely passed, and in fact the press trumpeted such. In my opinion all they did was kick the […]
The Federal Reserve on Friday reported that consumer credit rose at an annual rate of 5.9% in August, the biggest increase in three months. The increase in consumer credit was led by an 8.1% increase in revolving credit, which is the category that includes credit cards. Non-revolving credit, which includes auto loans, also rose at […]
Last month a watershed event took place in Iraq. During a raid near Sinjar, an interesting Al-Qaeda figure, Shiek Muthanna, was killed in a raid. This fellow was in change of bringing foreign fighters into the country to execute operations against US forces and the Iraqi population. While it is always a great day when […]
