“Welcome to the Rubbish Rally. Of course, Singapore investors cannot be faulted for riding the wassail on Wall Street. But they might also want to consider the suspect nature of the drivers behind this recent market surge,” writes Lim Say Boon, director of research at OCBC Securities, in the Straits Times.
Hisashi Kitahara of the Daily Yomiuri says: “There are growing voices in Japan calling for the government to print money as a trump card to end deflation. The man who touched off the arguments was Prof. Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, the recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. The biggest problem Japan is saddled with is lack of demand, but banks are not carrying out their primary function of acting as a financial medium because of the problem of bad loans.
A great piece of parody from the Cleveland Fed, sending up the Greenspan-Bush Voodoonomics II reprise. Very much in the vein of material written by former, Austrian-aware, President Jerry Jordan. (Read Here) ’And to think that there are still some ingrates who claim you have debased your currency, bankrupted your treasury, and impoverished your citizens.’
Highly recommended!
“We must not risk another disappointment in the stock market or the economy. That would be devastating. Mr. Greenspan and all his little maestros need to pour it on. This is no time to take chances. Add more money. Do whatever it takes to get America humming again. Supply-side tax cuts set the stage for strong economic growth. But it’s up to the Fed to show us the money,” writes Larry Kudlow in NRO.
“Millions Wasted on Jobs Creation“ (BBC): “According to the NAO report, published on Tuesday, more than half the new jobs that have resulted from the current system would have been created anyway. At least a quarter of the jobs created had the knock-on effect of displacing other jobs in the disadvantaged areas in question, the report said.”
I couldn’t resist bidding on a few of the Saddam Dinars available through Ebay. I ended up with four 100-dinar notes and four 250-dinar notes, all uncirculated. I paid about $1.00 for each.
Edmund L Andrews filed the chilling story ”Why Wheels of Recovery Are Spinning in Iraq“ for the NYT: “Electricity, essential to restoring normalcy to business and personal life, remains crippled because looters are stealing copper cable as quickly as it is being installed. Oil production, Iraq’s main source of income, is still far below its prewar level because of pilfering and perhaps even sabotage at oil fields and refineries.
Economy Seen Poised for Recovery (AP): “The U.S. economy has taken hits during the past three years from the bursting stock market bubble, a recession and terrorist attacks. Conditions now, finally, offer the prospect of better growth during the last six months of the year. But forecasters concede they made similar predictions in 2002 and 2001 and were proved wrong.”
