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The list of countries with deflation is growing by the month.  We have Spain, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland.  Now add Germany.
German consumer prices fell for the first time in 22 years in July, official figures have shown.
Prices fell 0.6% in July from a year earlier – the first fall since March 1987, when they declined by [...]

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Yesterday, I mentioned that the housing data, while generally positive (the first uptick nationally in 34 months), contained some negative news due to seasonality.
The crux of the problem lies in the strong tendency for house prices to increase in the spring and summer because that is when demand for housing is greatest. Add in [...]

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Rio Tinto executive arrested in China ‘was protester in Tiananmen Square’ – Telegraph
worked for a state-run company, was forced to quit over Tiananmen Square.

Harvard Professor Says Some Stupid Things – 538
Differences between single payer and socialized medicine.

If a bank is too big to fail, it must be broken up – Telegraph
None of the [...]

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The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices for May 2009 were released today and the data showed a marked contrast to previous months. Fully 14 of 20 markets showed an increase in home prices in that month, making it the first time since July 2006 that the overall index has risen month-to-month. On a year-over-year basis, home [...]

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Update: These clips have sadly been removed from YouTube.
Clips from the 1987 PBS Film called Trader featuring famed investor Paul Tudor Jones are catching everyone’s imagination all of a sudden.  Is it that we are all secretly worried about a sock market crash?  Who knows.  It’s entertaining nonetheless and is a good piece of financial [...]

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msnbc.com:Study: Texting drivers 23 times more likely to crash
Don’t do it!

Google Sells Stake in AOL, Loses $717 Million
Au pair lockar i sämre tider – DN.se
Swedish article. Everyone wants to be an Au Pair now in this downturn.

Divorce Undermines Health In Ways Remarriage Doesn’t Heal
Women are getting more beautiful – Times Online
But men are still [...]

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From the FT.
Iceland’s bid to join the European Union received a boost on Monday when the 27-nation bloc’s foreign ministers agreed without delay to ask the European Commission for its opinion.
The swift decision means that Iceland, which only submitted its membership application on July 17, has already moved ahead of Balkan countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina [...]

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Alcohol used to seen as a recession-proof good. This downturn is changing that thinking as evidence of cutbacks in spending, consumption, and on-premise drinking abound.  Back in the Spring of 2008, Nielsen conducted a bunch of surveys to see how the economy was affecting the consumption of wine and spirits.  The answer then was it [...]

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Jeremy Grantham is out again with a very important investment strategy piece entitled “Boring Fair Price!”  He leads off by talking about how markets went from extremely overvalued a year ago to cheap back to a state which he considers fair value.  But, he sees the recent rally as a speculative rally which is a [...]

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In late June, I posted two items China’s present growth story is built on malinvestment and Chinese stock market bubble inflating, on the building bubble in Chinese lending and asset markets.  The crux of the pots was that China, in its efforts to reflate the economy to meet very high growth short-term targets and start [...]