(Reuters) – The Federal Reserve Bank of New York will release on Friday documents showing it took “prompt action” four years ago to highlight problems with the benchmark interest rate known as Libor and to press for reform, an official at the regional U.S. central bank said on Wednesday.
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Comments »Here are today’s hybrid movers under $10, click here for charts.
Comments »Circle jerk action thus far, but the swings are minor. So get a samich and enjoy the great outdoors.
via The Economist
THE most memorable incidents in earth-changing events are sometimes the most banal. In the rapidly spreading scandal of LIBOR (the London inter-bank offered rate) it is the very everydayness with which bank traders set about manipulating the most important figure in finance. They joked, or offered small favours. “Coffees will be coming your way,” promised one trader in exchange for a fiddled number. “Dude. I owe you big time!… I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger,” wrote another. One trader posted diary notes to himself so that he wouldn’t forget to fiddle the numbers the next week. “Ask for High 6M Fix,” he entered in his calendar, as he might have put “Buy milk”.
What may still seem to many to be a parochial affair involving Barclays, a 300-year-old British bank, rigging an obscure number, is beginning to assume global significance. The number that the traders were toying with determines the prices that people and corporations around the world pay for loans or receive for their savings. It is used as a benchmark to set payments on about $800 trillion-worth of financial instruments, ranging from complex interest-rate derivatives to simple mortgages. The number determines the global flow of billions of dollars each year. Yet it turns out to have been flawed.
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Comments »MADRID (AP) – Spain’s government imposed more austerity measures on the beleaguered country Wednesday as it unveiled sales tax hikes and spending cuts aimed at shaving €65 billion ($79.85 billion) off the state budget over the next two and a half years.
A day after winning European Union approval for a huge bank bailout and breathing space on its deficit program, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy warned Parliament that Spain’s future was at stake as it grapples with recession, a bloated deficit and investor wariness of its sovereign debt.
“We are living in a crucial moment which will determine our future and that of our families, that of our youths, of our welfare state,” Rajoy said to catcalls from the opposition socialists and other parties as he revealed the biggest single amount of projected deficit savings in modern Spanish history.
He spoke as thousands of miners stung by a huge cut in government subsidies marched through downtown Madrid and clashed with riot police outside the Industry Ministry.
The spending cuts, designed to cut €65 billion off state budgets by 2015, include a wage cut for civil servants and members of the national parliament and a new wave of closures at state-owned companies. Spain will also speed up a gradual increase in the retirement age from 65 to 67. They are to be approved officially Friday at a Cabinet meeting.
Spain has had to digest round after round of austerity measures since Rajoy’s conservative government took power in December. Until now, there have been €60 billion ($73.71 billion) in spending cuts and tax hikes by the central government or regional administrations. If you include measures taken by the previous, Socialist government, the number goes up to €75 billion. Now, albeit spread over two-and-a-half years, comes another €65 billion.
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Comments »[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sThcwmx3rs 450 300]
Comments »[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSgUENZ9O94 450 300]
Comments »Ice core samples also show that CO2 is lead by higher temperatures and not the other way around……
Comments »“In its monthly Oil Market Report released today, OPEC projects that demand for crude would rise by an average of 900,000 barrels/day in 2012 and that growth would decline to 800,000 barrels/day in 2013. Expected demand for crude in 2013 totals 89.5 million barrels/day, of which demand on OPEC totals 29.6 million barrels/day. The cartel estimates 2012 demand of 88.68 million barrels/day, up 1% from 2011.”
Comments »“Income investors need to be careful with some of the best companies in America. A dividend bubble appears to be forming in many great stocks. Dividends have been one of the great drivers of investment decisions for the past two years, as it was the high-yielding utility sector that performed the best of the S&P 500 sectors in 2011. ”
Comments »“The start of the earnings season in the US provides an opportunity to review the currency correlations with the S&P 500. We conduct our analysis on the percentage change of the currencies and percentage change in the S&P 500. What we find then is the correlation of the returns, which is more important to investors then if the levels are correlated.
We look at a 30-day correlation to see the near-term trend and we look at the 60-day correlation to the slightly longer term. The general take away is that despite a number of other drivers and influences, the correlation between most of the currencies we looked at and the S&P 500 has increased in the recent period.”
Comments »“IRWIN, Pa. – About 20 miles east of Pittsburgh, the former heart of the nation’s steel industry, a small company called ExOne is churning out a new generation of stainless steel boat propellers, oil pump parts and door knobs.
But there are no clanging hammers, wheezing presses or even computer-controlled milling machines.
Instead, a dozen 3-D printers quietly stitch together industrial parts by meticulously spreading hundreds or thousands of layers of powdered metal onto a canvas until they form three-dimensional shapes.”
Comments »I’ll say not entirely, but obviously politics and psychology play a major role in making decisions which ultimately effect the outcome of the economy.
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“NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The mortgage market appears to finally be stabilizing — as long as you ignore loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration.
Increasingly, FHA-insured loans are falling into foreclosure or serious delinquency, moving in the opposite direction of loans guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or those held by banks, which are all showing signs of improvement.”
Comments »“The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index could climb to 1,600 by 2014 from about 1,350 today provided D.C. politicians don’t derail recovery with botched policies and finger-pointing, says David Kotok, chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Cumberland Advisors.
Meanwhile, a European Union decision to provide Spain with $35 billion in emergency loans to prop up its banking sector won’t work, as the move fails to address Europe’s fundamental problems of too much debt and too little growth.
In the U.S., hiring remains at bay as does consumer confidence and spending, largely in part because the country remains wary over the fate of the economy.”
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