Synergistic Toxicity: GMO Foods Much Worse for You Than Previous Thought

Fuck Monsanto….

In plain English if the study above is complicated for you….

Pump up the volume…

Dip your toe if you got the cash…

The slowly bursting bubble…

The debt was always there, but now it may be transparent on the balance sheet for many companies.

The markets may be rigged, but it is better than the casino….unless you play Texas Hold ’em

…to the moon Alice…

“Japanese Finance Minister Jun Azumi said that his nation and China are committed to help resolve the European debt crisis through the International Monetary Fund once euro region members take further steps themselves.

“We shared the view that Europe needs to make more efforts to create a bigger firewall,” Azumi told reporters in Beijing yesterday after meeting Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan. “We also agreed to act together as the IMF will probably ask the U.S., Japan and China” to help boost its lending capacity.

The meetings deepened dialogue between Asia’s two largest economies after a visit by Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to Beijing in December, and contrast with periodic tensions between the two over maritime boundaries. The continued readiness of Japan and China to help offers Europeans an inducement as they close in on a 130 billion-euro ($170 billion) Greek bailout.

“Showing China and Japan are united to support the debt crisis is good news for European markets,” Hiroshi Miyazaki, chief economist at Shinkin Asset Management Co. in Tokyo, said before the meeting. “It may still take some time for the two to decide specifics as Europe hasn’t reached agreement on a solution within the region.”

Full article

Asia

Europe

Futures

Currencies

Commodities

LIBOR, EURIBOR, 10 year yields for Italy, Spain, France, and Germany

Merkel proves to have two iron fists….

The Dow made another post-financial crisis rally high Thursday. To provide some further perspective to the current Dow rally and in response to several requests, all major market rallies of the last 111 years are plotted on today’s chart. Each dot represents a major stock market rally as measured by the Dow with the majority of rallies referred to by a label which states the year in which the rally began. The difference between today’s chart and last week’s chart is that for last week’s chart a rally was defined as an advance that followed a 15% correction (i.e. a major correction). For today’s chart, however, a rally is being defined as an advance that follows a 30% decline (i.e. a major bear market). As today’s chart illustrates, the Dow has begun a major rally 13 times over the past 111 years which equates to an average of one rally every 8.5 years. It is also interesting to note that the duration and magnitude of each rally correlated fairly well with the linear regression line (gray upward sloping line). As it stands right now, the current Dow rally that began in March 2009 (blue dot labeled you are here) would be classified as well below average in both duration and magnitude.

Go here for the chart.

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) — Scientists have taken a first early step toward escaping the limits of a technological principle called Moore’s Law by creating a working transistor using a single phosphorus atom.

The atom was etched into a silicon bed with “gates” to control electrical flow and metallic contacts to apply voltage, researchers reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. It is the first such device to be precisely positioned using a repeatable technology, they said, and may one day help ease the way toward creation of a so-called quantum computer that would be significantly smaller and faster than existing technology.

Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months to two years, and it’s predicted to reach its limit with existing technology in 2020. Cutting the size of a transistor to a single atom may defeat that concept.

“We really decided 10 years ago to start this program to try and make single-atom devices as fast as we could, and beat that law,” said Michelle Simmons, director of ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “So here we are in 2012, and we’ve made a single-atom transistor roughly 8 to 10 years ahead of where the industry is going to be.”

Moore’s Law is named for Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp., the world’s largest chipmaker. He first described the phenomenon in a 1965 report that was later cited by others with his name attached to it.

(CNN) — As John Avlon has recently calculated, there is a real possibility that the Republican primary process could fail to yield a majority winner.

What would happen then?

Journalists like to speculate about “brokered conventions”: the kind of conventions we had 50 and 100 years ago, where party bosses chose presidential nominees in smoke-filled rooms. But you can’t have a “brokered convention” in a system where there are no “brokers.”

Here’s an example of how the old system worked:

In 1952, most rank-and-file Republicans wanted to nominate Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, the leader of the party’s conservative wing.

But about three-quarters of the states had neither primaries nor caucuses. Their delegates were chosen at state party conventions, and those delegates answered to powerful state officeholders, typically the state governor.

So when the GOP convened in Chicago in 1952, those powerful state officeholders could negotiate among themselves, confident that they controlled the delegate count from their state.

That’s how Eisenhower won in 1952. The two most powerful Republican governors in the country — Thomas Dewey of New York and Earl Warren of California — preferred Eisenhower, and so Eisenhower it was.

That’s not how it would happen today.

Modern governors do not control their state parties the way governors did in the 1950s. And today’s delegates won’t do as they are told.

What would happen today?

Tehran, Iran (CNN) — Officials with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency begin a second round of talks Monday with Iranian officials over the country’s nuclear program, a day after Tehran cut off crude exports to British and French companies in retaliation for a new round of sanctions imposed on the regime.

The two days of talks come amid heightened tensions in the region, with Israel making clear it is pondering an attack on Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure, while Iran warned it could cut off the narrow strait through which oil tankers sail in and out of the Persian Gulf.

The scheduled talks between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iranian officials are billed as an opportunity for the watchdog agency to get more clarity about the “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program,” the group said.

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency cited the head of the IAEA mission as saying it would take time to resolve Iran’s nuclear issue because it is complicated.

The Boss explains why there is a critical, questioning and angry patriotism at the heart of his new album Wrecking Ball

Read here:

President Obama’s re-elect team defended White House energy policy on Sunday as gas prices shoot toward the $4 mark and beyond, a level that could devastate voters’ pocketbooks as well as Obama’s chances for a second term.

Nationally, gas prices are $3.53 a gallon, up 25 cents since Jan. 1, and likely headed to $4.25 a gallon by late April. Republicans have demanded more oil production at home, as well as building the Keystone XL pipeline across the middle of the U.S. to allow oil from Canada to reach Texas refineries.

Obama rejected the plan, but one of his spokesmen, Robert Gibbs, said the president is looking to increase domestic energy production.

“Just on Friday, the Department of Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic. The president has increased our fuel efficiency and energy efficiency standards so we do use less energy, which will help drive down the price,” Gibbs said. “Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we’re making progress.”

But John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil and founder of Citizens for Affordable Energy, told Fox News that oil production today is only 7 million barrels per day when it used to be 10 million per day.

Hofmeister warned that the global economy is in “the crosshairs” of a precarious situation in which China is growing its demand for oil each year by millions of barrels per day and turmoil in the Middle East is creating “some of the most unpredictable, volatile, geopolitical situations” in the world.

Global oil demand, meanwhile, is expected to increase by another 1.5 percent to 89.25 million barrels a day in 2012, according to the Energy Information Administration.

TOKYO (AP) — Japan posted a record high trade deficit in January after its nuclear crisis shut down nearly all the nation’s reactors for tougher checks, sending fuel imports surging. Exports were hurt by a strong yen and weak demand.

The 1.48 trillion yen ($18.7 billion) deficit reported Monday highlights Japan’s increased dependence on imported fuel after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami sent the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant into multiple meltdowns.

As public worries grew, nearly all the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan were stopped for inspections. The government wants to restart at least some of the reactors, after checking for better tsunami and quake protection.

Resource-poor Japan imports almost all its oil. Until the Fukushima disaster, the country had trumpeted nuclear technology as a safe and cheap answer to its energy needs.

Now, Japan is importing more natural gas and oil as utilities boost non-nuclear power generation. Imports of natural gas in January vaulted 74 percent from a year earlier and imports of petroleum jumped nearly 13 percent.

Increased energy imports contributed to Japan last year recording its first annual trade deficit since 1980. Analysts have said Japan may return to a trade surplus in 2013.

There was bad news for Japan’s manufacturing powerhouses, with a strong yen and sluggish global economy contributing to slowing exports.

Exports declined 9.3 percent in January from a year earlier, particularly in computer chips and electronic parts. Imports in January grew 9.8 percent.

BEIJING (AP) — Ms. Zhang, a schoolteacher in the central city of Anyang, lent $43,000 last year to entrepreneurs who couldn’t get loans from state banks. Now as growth cools and Beijing cracks down on informal credit, Zhang and thousands of other small lenders are unpaid and angry.

Underground lending by ordinary Chinese like Zhang flourished over the past decade, providing trillions of yuan (hundreds of billions of dollars) needed by private companies that create China’s new jobs and wealth.

Its popularity reflects public desperation for an alternative to China’s banks, which pay low deposit rates that fail to keep up with inflation and channel savings to government companies.

But the high cost of underground credit — interest rates of 70 percent a year or higher — and a slump in global demand caused a wave of business failures last year, prompting owners in cities such as Wenzhou in the southeast to flee.

The shockwave is now hitting the Chinese savers who put up money for those loans. Protests erupted in Anyang and other areas as lenders demanded officials get back their money.

“We have no other investment options and bank interest rates are too low,” said Zhang, who asked not to be identified further. Hopes of getting back the 270,000 yuan ($43,000) she lent are pinned on the courts so long as the government is willing to let a case proceed.

Rising defaults threaten to aggravate social tensions as the Communist Party tries to enforce calm ahead of a once-a-decade handover of power to a younger generation of leaders due late this year. The public already is fuming over inflation, corruption, product safety scandals and pollution.

Leaders including Premier Wen Jiabao, the top economic official, have repeatedly promised more credit for small companies. But most loans still go to state enterprises that have close ties with banks and form the power base of officials. Experts say there have been slight improvements but the situation hasn’t changed fundamentally.

“It always has been hard for small Chinese companies to borrow money from banks,” said Guo Tianyong, director of the Banking Research Center at Beijing’s Central University of Finance and Economics. He said the situation has worsened in the past year.

Entrepreneurs were struggling with slumping global demand when Beijing clamped down on a credit boom to cool its overheated economy. State banks cut the small amount of private sector lending they were doing while continuing support to state industry. Private companies failed and the survivors cut payrolls.

Only 19 percent of bank lending last year went to small businesses, while total loans fell 6 percent from 2010 to 7.5 trillion yuan ($1.2 trillion), according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

TOKYO, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Capital flight, soaring borrowing costs, tanking currency and stocks and a central bank forced to pump vast amounts of cash into local banks — that is what Japan may have to contend with if it fails to tackle its snowballing debt.

Not long ago such doomsday scenarios would be dismissed in Tokyo as fantasies of ill-informed foreigners sitting on loss-making bets “shorting Japan”.

Today this is what is on bureaucrats’ minds in Japan’s centre of political and economic power.

“It’s scary when you think what could happen if there’s triple-selling of bonds, stocks and the yen. The chance of this happening is bigger than markets think,” says a senior official.

Leaning back in a leather sofa in his office, the official appears relaxed, but the way he wastes no time answering questions about a debt meltdown, suggests it is an all too familiar topic.

Read the rest here.

SHANGHAI (AP) — Apple’s dispute over the iPad trademark deepened Monday after the Chinese company that claims ownership of the name said it won a court ruling against sales of the popular tablet computer in China.

Xie Xianghui, a lawyer for Shenzhen Proview Technology, said the Intermediate People’s Court in Huizhou, a city in southern China’s Guangdong province, had ruled on Friday that distributors should stop selling iPads in China.

The ruling, which was also reported widely in China’s state media, may not have a far-reaching effect. In its battle with Apple, Proview is utilizing lawsuits in several places and also requesting commercial authorities in 40 cities to block iPad sales.

Apple Inc. said in a statement Monday that its case is still pending in mainland China. The company has appealed to Guangdong’s High Court against an earlier ruling in Proview’s favor.