I have felt for sometime that dollar strength is a counter-trend that has a sell-by date written all over it. You see, the Federal Reserve is ballooning its balance sheet like nobody’s business as it tries to be the global lender of last resort. This is very inflationary. Apparently, the Fed wants to [...]

So, I am back in the saddle after a great weekend in Palm Beach. And three days almost entirely away from Newspapers, Televisions, Telephones, and Computers is a very good thing to clear the head. (Although I did happen to catch Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live” and I thought it was well [...]

Echoing my sentiments in the last post, “The U.S. banking crisis: where are we?,” Stephen Roach, the head of Morgan Stanley Asia has made a blistering attack on the U.S. Congress. He has labeled Congress’s response to crisis over-regulation and sees many more losses to come from real economy effects of the global credit [...]

I have written a few posts about China recently. None have taken a look at the big picture for Chinese growth and at its affects on big Chinese companies that are receiving large overseas investment in their shares. Overall, China will not decouple. At a minimum, growth will slow — by how much [...]

I always feel a bit sceptical when I read a report about unending growth and prosperity. Rio Tinto thinks that the metals and mining boom will continue unabated for years. That certainly puts him in the same camp as Jim Rogers. Rio CEO Tom Albanese was quoted as saying,
“There is no question that [...]

At the end of last week, the warning came. The Chinese officially warned Hank Paulson et al. that they better get their act together on Fannie and Freddie. The Chinese own a ton of GSE paper and they would be hopping mad to see their investments lose value.
The implicit threat is that the Chinese [...]

The Beijing Olympic games are supposed to be China’s coming out cotillion. As the west struggles with deleveraging and recession, China wants to make a statement that it has arrived. The games have gone off remarkably well and most reports from the games have been positive.
But, China is coming out in other places [...]

While the finance world is concerned with its own problems of writedowns and deflating asset prices, a proxy war of great importance is being fought in the country of Georgia. It has everything to do with both a Russo-American power struggle and oil, with far-reaching implications for geopolitics.
This war started as a clash between [...]

The Financial Times Deutschland is reporting that China and Iraq want to revive a Saddam-era oil contract between the two nation that is worth billions of dollars. The contract, an obvious economic coup for China, secures Beijing exploration and development in the south of Baghdad situated Ahdab oil field.
The Iraqi government looks to be doing [...]

The Vancouver Sun is on a roll today. They have another post on ICBC that makes for interesting reading. Frankly, I don’t know what to make of it. But it makes for a good read.
Chinese bank has market cap twice that of JPMorgan
First, the article starts off stating that the head of [...]