(Off-topic) Banks' banker warns of downturn
THE risk of a 1930s-style economic slump has been heightened by "euphoric" markets tapping cheap global credit, one of the world's pre-eminent financial institutions has said.
In its annual report, the Bank for International Settlements noted that the conditions that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Asian crises in the 1990s reflected the current environment.From The Age
Shares of LED specialist Cree, Inc. (CREE - 41.29) bolted to a gain of nearly 5% right out of the gate this morning, after analysts at Canaccord Genuity announced that the company had won a key 60-watt replacement bulb contract with General Electric Company (GE). However, CREE has since spiraled into negative territory, after a rep for GE flat-out denied the report.We have not made a decision?
"There is no basis for this rumor. We have not made a decision," asserted GE spokeswoman Kim Freeman....MORE
Sept. 2010And many, many more
Buyout Rumors on Cree (Again) CREE
Sept. 2009
Cree: IBM Rumor Resurfaces (Updated) CREE
Not all initial public offerings are getting the same interest as LinkedIn.
Shares of Glencore, the large commodities trader and miner that officially started trading in London on Tuesday, sank to 525 pence, or $8.46. That’s down from its offering price of 530 pence, or $8.60.
Last week, Glencore sold 1.14 billion shares, raising $10 billion in the largest I.P.O. of the year. The offering last week valued the company at nearly $60 billion.
But unlike LinkedIn and other big technology debuts in the U.S., Glencore got a lukewarm reception when it started trading on a conditional basis, amid concern that commodity prices might have peaked. Shares of the commodities giant increased to 553 pence on its first day of trading before settling back down to its offering price 530 pence.
Since then, investors interest has been tepid. On May 23, Glencore stock hit a low of 514 pence. Shares of the company, which were formally added to the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday, are currently trading at 530 pence. Glencore is set to officially start trading in Hong Kong on May 25....MORE
...Some of Duranty's editors criticized his reporting as tendentious, but The Times kept him as a correspondent until 1941. Since the 1980's, the paper has been publicly acknowledging his failures. Ukrainian-American and other organizations have repeatedly called on the Pulitzer Prize Board to cancel Duranty's prize and The Times to return it, mainly on the ground of his later failure to report the famine.The famine that Stalin engineered killed five million people.
The Pulitzer board has twice declined to withdraw the award, most recently in November 2003, finding "no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception" in the 1931 reporting that won the prize (see Pulitzer Board statement), and The Times does not have the award in its possession.
Harper’s Magazine and Scott Horton were not supposed to win the National Magazine Award for Reporting this year. Of the five finalists in the category, there were three real contenders, and most people working in the ever-shrinking category of serious magazine journalism were sure the award would go to Rolling Stone for the article by Michael Hastings that led to the downfall of Gen. Stanley McChrystal or The New Yorker for Jane Mayer’s profile of the billionaire Koch brothers.
But Harper’s beat out the two big names, scoring a major upset with Horton’s piece about three detainees at Guantánamo Bay who died in 2006. The government said the men had hung themselves inan effort to bring on a public relations crisis that might force the U.S. to close the prison. But Horton laid out a case that they had in fact been killed—whether deliberately or inadvertently—during a torture session.
In fact, Horton’s story, which the judges for the award—administered by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) and regarded as the Pulitzer for magazines—found so compelling, was actually a well-shopped one, familiar to some of the most experienced investigative journalists in the business. These included The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh as well as teams from CBS News’ 60 Minutes and ABC News’ Brian Ross Investigative Unit that had looked into the alleged killings and the accounts provided by the men who became Horton’s key sources, and found more flight of fancy than fact. (Horton acknowledges in his story that his source had been in contact with ABC News.)
Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News’ chief Pentagon correspondent, was another of those journalists. He worked on the story off and on for four months, during which time he reviewed “thousands of pages” of documents, interviewed Horton’s main source, and “talked to at least a dozen people.”
“Ultimately I just didn’t find the story credible, quite frankly,” Miklaszewski says. “I devoted a lot of time to it, and my conclusion was that it just didn’t seem possible that that many people could have been involved in a conspiracy and to have [the killings] remain secret. It stretched all credulity, I thought.”
Hersh confirmed to Adweek that he had dug into the story and dropped it too. A New York Times reporter was also approached by the parties who’d been pushing the allegations of homicide and cover-up at Guantánamo, a person close to the situation says.HT: Mediabistro
Only after the big guys passed was the story shopped to Horton. He won for reporting, but in fact the story fell right into his lap, factual flaws and all.
“We couldn’t really believe it when the piece came out,” one of the reporters who looked into the story says. “I can’t believe Harper’s, I really can’t.”...MORE
Having been proven right about their prediction of a rather substantial correction in commodities earlier this month, Goldman Sachs is now out with a new view.Here's the headline story from Bloomberg:
A bullish view.
As Jeffrey Currie and team wrote on Tuesday:
We remain structurally bullish commodities
Although we remain structurally bullish and have long argued the structural case for being long, timing does remain critical. This was evident in the recent market correction, which brought commodities down roughly 10% from their April highs. With prices now more in line with near-term fundamentals and price targets, we believe that the risk/reward once again favours being long commodities. Although the economy has likely shifted into a slower, but sustained, growth environment, we continue to expect that economic growth will likely be sufficient to tighten key supplyconstrained markets in 2H2011, leading to higher prices from current levels
Raising oil price targets on persistent impacts from MENA events
We expect that the ongoing loss of Libyan crude oil production and disappointing Non-OPEC production will continue to tighten the oil market to critical levels in early 2012, with rising industry cost pressures likely to be felt this year. We are now embedding in our forecasts that Libyan production losses will lead to the effective exhaustion of OPEC spare capacity by early 2012. This raises our year-end Brent crude oil price forecast to $120/bbl from $105/bbl, our 12-month forecast to $130/bbl from $107/bbl and our end-2012 forecast to $140/bbl from $120/bbl....MORE
WTI is up 1.39 at 99.09
Commodities rebounded from the biggest drop in almost two weeks after Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said it’s turning “more bullish” on raw materials, while stocks and U.S. index futures gained. German bonds fell.
Sugar jumped 2.7 percent, copper climbed 1.3 percent and oil advanced 1.2 percent at 7:10 a.m. in New York. The MSCI World (MXWO) Index rose 0.3 percent and futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index increased 0.2 percent, after gaining as much as 0.5 percent. The euro strengthened 0.4 percent to $1.4096. Germany’s 10-year bund yield added three basis points.
Goldman Sachs suggested buying oil, copper and zinc, reversing last month’s call to sell commodities, while Morgan Stanley raised its forecast for Brent crude by 20 percent. The Greek government endorsed an asset-sale plan and 6 billion euros ($8.4 billion) of budget cuts to win extra aid, while European Central Bank council member Christian Noyer said a restructuring of the country’s debt would be a “horror story.”
“The risk/reward once again favors being long commodities,” Jeffrey Currie, head of commodities research at Goldman Sachs in London, wrote in an e-mailed report today. “Economic growth will likely be sufficient to tighten key supply-constrained markets in the second half, leading to higher prices.”
The S&P GSCI index of 24 raw materials climbed 1.1 percent, after falling 1.7 percent yesterday. Oil gained $1.14 to $98.84 a barrel in New York. Goldman, which correctly advised investors to sell crude oil and copper last month before a price slump, raised its 12-month prediction for Brent crude to $130 a barrel from $107....
"The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts. Key features of the GVCS: Open Source - Low-Cost - Modular - User-Serviceable - DIY - Closed-Loop Manufacturing - High Performance - Heirloom Design - Flexible Fabrication."
"A modern, comfortable lifestyle relies on a variety of efficient Industrial Machines. If you eat bread, you rely on an Agricultural Combine. If you live in a wood house, you rely on a Sawmill. Each of these machines relies on other machines in order for it to exist. If you distill this complex web of interdependent machines into a reproduceable, simple, closed-loop system, you get these 50 machines."
The GVCS is a work-in-progress. See the wiki, the blog and (the best introduction) the movie.
In December 2007 I wrote:Always remembering that Mongolia and Inner Mongolia are separated by an international border.
How the heck did I miss Mongolia Energy Co. Ltd.?...The question has haunted me to this day.
[you really need to get out more -ed]
MEco was the number two stock in the Bloomberg Worldwide Index that year, up 5911.17%.
I vowed that I "will study and learn, and one day my chance will come."
[ummm, wasn't that Lincoln?]
So when a reader emailed in response to this morning's "China tightens grip on rare earths":
"How do I participate?"I had the [a -ed] answer.
IMBSREHTco's parent company has world’s largest rare earths deposits.
[the first letters of the acronym are IMBS, tee hee -ed]...
HT: Abnormal Returns
Van Eck Global, the New York-based fund sponsor known for its natural resources investments, filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to market an equities fund of companies in Mongolia, the copper-rich landlocked Asian nation that shares borders with both Russia and China.
The Market Vectors Mongolia ETF will hold at least 80 percent of its assets in companies either based in or listed in Mongolia, or based elsewhere but derive at least half their revenues from business activities in Mongolia, according to the filing. Van Eck said that as of the filing, the basic materials, energy and industrials represent a significant portion of the index, which it didn’t name.
The country has an array of mineral deposits, including oil, coal, copper, molybdenum, tungsten, phosphates, tin, nickel, zinc, fluorspar, gold, silver and copper, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s “World Factbook.” Copper is likely to be a big part of the country’s economic future. According to the CIA, the Mongolian government in October 2009 passed legislation on an investment agreement to develop Mongolia’s Oyu Tolgoi mine, one of the world’s largest untapped copper deposits....MORE
Punks, rocks, skin heads... over last decades the world has seen all possible shapes and forms of human haircut. What was in fashion among steppe nomads some 2,000 years ago?Prof. Bayar's research sheds light into the best hairdos of the past...
Nomadic chic hairdo
Reconstructed by M.Chimeddorj
The stock market’s volatility index rose to its highest level in two months on Monday as investor concern over the worsening European debt crisis carried over to U.S. markets and drove stocks down.I am too old and jaded. My first though on reading the headline was the sperm scene in Everything you always wanted to know about sex:
The Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, or VIX, jumped nearly 15% to 20.03 early Monday morning, rising above 20 for the first time since March 23. Higher VIX readings for a third-straight session suggest investors are increasingly wary that Europe’s debt woes will continue to drag on U.S. markets.
The VIX was up 1.23, or 7.1%, to 18.66 in recent trading....MORE
"What if he's masturbating? I'll end up on the wall!!!"
-Woody Allen
As foretold by the prophecy.*Let the five-day chart tell the story, via Yahoo Finance:
[oh brother -ed]...
South Carolina is close to pulling off a dramatic end-run around the federal government.
If that state succeeds, the end result could have a serious impact on every U.S. manufacturing industry from cars to toilets.
It could even help balance state budgets.
Dueling Light-Bulb Laws
I'm talking about South Carolina's Incandescent Light Bulb Freedom Act – a trivial-sounding piece of state legislation that could open a significant loophole for states that are desperate to create jobs and drum up revenue.
The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 – a predating piece of federal legislation – decreed that all incandescent bulbs be phased out by 2012, and permanently replaced by their fluorescent and halogen counterparts.
That's where the loophole comes in. You see, South Carolina's light bulb legislation would let the state continue to manufacture and sell incandescent bulbs – so long as they were made and sold exclusively in South Carolina.
While South Carolina's attempt to nullify a federal law smacks of an antebellum crisis, the move may well work. That's because, according to the Supreme Court's 1935 decision in the case of Schechter Poultry vs. United States, the federal government does not have the power to regulate commerce that is entirely conducted within a state.
So if South Carolina attempted to buy incandescent light bulbs from one of the country's leading manufacturers, it would be in trouble – since none of the major light bulb manufacturers are South Carolina companies.
But if South Carolina makes the bulbs itself, and offers them for sale only within the state, the Schechter decision would seem to apply - though subsequent Supreme Court decisions in the opposite direction make the question a close one....MORE
J.P. Morgan is out with its report today on The Mosaic Company (NYSE: MOS), upgrading MOS from Neutral to Overweight.And:
In a note to clients, J.P. Morgan writes, "We are upgrading Mosaic to an Overweight rating now that we are no longer restricted. Rising potash and healthy DAP prices provide the basis of strong earnings growth for calendar 2011. Opportunities stemming from sales of 1 million tons of potash that were previously provided at cost to Potash Corp and possible stability in DAP prices due to a healthy demand environment despite the Ma'aden capacity addition represent opportunities in excess of our forecasts. The balance sheet is in a net cash position, Mosaic generates good free cash flow, and the overhang of its 100 million share equity offering is behind it and the fertilizer sector generally."
J.P. Morgan lowers its PT from $77 to $74.
Stifel Nicolaus, citing lower risk and share prices, has upgraded its rating on The MosaicSee also last Friday's "Follow-up: "Mosaic: Upgraded to Positive from Neutral at Susquehanna" (MOS)":Company (NYSE: MOS) from Hold to Buy....MORE
The earlier "Mosaic Announces Pricing of Secondary Offering, Susquehana Says "BUY", Charity Scores $4 Billion (MOS)" had a snippet from Notable Calls, here's more.
The stock is down 85 cents at $65.46.
A great day to buy some calls!
(Susquehanna's parent company, Susquehanna International Group is probably the largest privately held options trading firm in the world.*)
Notable Calls brings it on home...
In 2004, Ben Stein wrote a thin book called How to Ruin Your Financial Life, a collection of short sarcastic chapters giving extremely bad advice. Chapter 32 is entitled “Invest in Penny Stocks”, and it aims directly at the purveyors of “advice” about the same:Here are a couple of the points Stein raises in defense of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
If you buy GE at $25 and it goes down by $.50, you’ve lost 2 percent, but if you buy XYZ at $.50 and it goes down by $.50, you’ve lost 100 percent.Let’s put aside for the time being Stein’s decision to cite GM as being the kind of wonderful stock which goes up and up in value, because now Stein has endorsed Accredited Members Inc., “a leading publisher of micro cap investment research”:
This will never happen to you, though, because you’re only buying really top-quality penny stocks, the GEs and GMs of the penny stocks — only they haven’t been discovered yet.
Plus, you’re only buying after you’ve gotten really hot tips, and when you know for sure that you’re going to watch that stock zoom into the stratosphere.
Stein firmly believes micro caps have a place in every investor’s portfolio and that the kind of in-depth research AMI brings to its readers can mean the difference between success and failure in investing in the micro cap space....MORE
6.) People accuse other people of crimes all of the time. What do we know about the complainant besides that she is a hotel maid? I love and admire hotel maids. They have incredibly hard jobs and they do them uncomplainingly. I am sure she is a fine woman. On the other hand, I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me. How do we know that this woman's word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail? Putting a man in Riker's is serious business. Maybe more than a few minutes of investigation is merited before it's done.The guy's a pig. Or to quote a November 2007 post:
8.) In what possible way is the price of the hotel room relevant except in every way: this is a case about the hatred of the have-nots for the haves, and that's what it's all about. A man pays $3,000 a night for a hotel room? He's got to be guilty of something. Bring out the guillotine.
"Short 'em All. They Aren't Worth the Paper They're Printed On"In this case we forgive him, it's Alpha Global Investors.
(click to enlarge)
Caterpillar Inc.
(CAT) chart analysis ;
1) Its called a BEARISH reversal
2) Price/Volume action is quite CLEAR
3) End of the commodity boom ?
4) As usual, expect the unexpected, but SELL signal is clear
5) Re entry (I doubt it) is right above 107.5
Lloyd's chief says 'we've been lucky' despite £2.3bn hit from earthquakes and floods as industry braces for Atlantic hurricanesSee the Dec. 30 Bloomberg story "Reinsurance Rates to Fall in January on Overcapacity" among others.
Insurers that fail to put up premiums will be the first to collapse if another big natural disaster strikes, the head of the Lloyd's of London insurance market warns.
Richard Ward, chief executive of Lloyd's, says the London market's lucky streak of relatively benign Atlantic hurricane seasons may be coming to an end, and that the next big natural catastrophe will hit the industry's capital, not just earnings, unless rates rise.
Firms insuring property against catastrophe risk, as well as marine insurers that insure oil rigs, would be among the worst affected. However, rising commercial premiums would feed through into higher household rates, industry experts say.
The key Atlantic storm season starts next month. "For the last two years we have been lucky," Ward will say at an industry conference on Tuesday. "Despite some highly active seasons – last year 12 hurricanes formed – none made landfall in the US. At some point our luck will run out."
After a string of costly disasters – the Japanese and New Zealand earthquakes and the Australian floods – Lloyd's insurers face claims totalling $3.8bn (£2.33bn), which already exceeds total losses for last year. The industry as a whole has been hit by losses of at least $50bn if the impact from recent US tornadoes is included....MORE
...Aon Re Global's market expectations, detailed by region, for the June 1
and July 1 renewals:
ROL Capacity Retention
Changes Changes Changes
United States:
Personal lines Flat to -20% +10 to +25% Voluntary
Standard commercial lines Flat to -15% +5 to +20% Voluntary
Complex commercial lines Flat to -10% Flat to +20% Voluntary
Europe Flat to -5% Plentiful Voluntary
United Kingdom Flat Plentiful Voluntary
Japan Flat to -5% Plentiful Voluntary
Asia Pacific (Ex. Japan) -10% to -15% Plentiful Voluntary
Australia -5% to -10% Plentiful Voluntary
Canada Flat to -10% Plentiful Voluntary
South America -5% to -20% Plentiful Voluntary
Mexico -10% to -20% Plentiful Voluntary
Caribbean -5% to -10% +5 to +20% Voluntary
Data Explorers, specialists in the tracking of short interest, on Thursday published a report on how investors sought to profit from the fallout of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano.
Here are their ‘observations in market sentiment over six days of closed airspace’, emphasis FT Alphaville’s:
Short selling in Airlines picked up especially in Lufthansa, BA, and Easyjet,Hire car companies including Hertz and Sixt. Investors closed shorts and institutions bought more shares
Logistics companies were predicted to suffer the most. SAS and Kuehne & Nagel saw increases in short selling with institutions selling 6% of their holdings in SAS in the last 5 days
Pharmaceuticals including Astrazeneca saw increased shorting and selling by institutions
Our basket of volcano affected companies saw an overall increase of 12% in their short interest
Shorts ran from Sky fearing increased ad’ revenues from people glued to the coverage...MORE
(In addition to grounding European aviation for days on end and exhausting headline-writers’ supplies of volcano puns.) The UK General Election … betting on 2010 temperatures … Southern California music festival … UK schoolgirls’ geography field trip … the Norwegian Government (iPad to the rescue) … touring wrestlers … Boston Marathon runners … the London Book Fair … health of pets … football, ice hockey and running … Premier League referees … the gilded progresses of celebs and pop stars … John Cleese’s trip home … football, cycling and running … Polish state funeral … transport of wounded soldiers … Dubai luxury hotel opening … Morocco golf tournaments … exams, exotic foods and surgery … yet more celebs (Hollywood ‘paralized’, no less) … Japan MotoGP … the international oil market … and even more celebs … European stocks and shares … Kenyan flower growers … Kenyan vegetable growers … movie premieres … BMW production in South Carolina … and still more celebs (superstar forced to take Irish Sea ferry) … youth boxing … equestrianism … football (also boxing, running, tennis, motorcyle racing) … organ transplants … Ghana farming, war crimes trials, rose growing, car making, flowers for New York weddings … travel plans of dogs, horses, snakes, geckos, turtles … classical concerts in San Diego … classical concerts in Salt Lake City … classical concerts in New York … Tribeca Film Festival … Metallica tour (kings of heavy metal fight back, take bus) … supplies of sea urchins, monkfish livers and scallops to British restaurants … art shipments … weddings … weddings … computer gaming events … airline emissions regulation … Indian TV host’s IPL contract (seems rather unfair) … Italian guitar players … supply chain resilience, whatever that is … college admissions … scareware cyberscams
And I saw the Sign of the Beast, 666, and it was, unsurprisingly, an airline.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
Iceland’s most active volcano, Grimsvötn, began erupting last night. Fire and Ice yet again, baby! Here are some answers to questions that you might have.
Why are you so excited?
Because it’s big! This is the most powerful eruption in Iceland in over 50 years. Radar measurements, pilot reports and ground observations estimate that the ash-rich eruption plume reached 17 km last night. By comparison, the Eyjafjallajökull plume of last year was 6-9 km high. This is important because every extra kilometre of plume requires a much faster eruption rate. The diagram below, taken from a paper by Mastin et al (2009) compares data from past eruptions.
The diagram shows that an eruption such as Eyjafjallajökull, with a plume of ~7 km corresponds to an eruption rate of 105 m3s-1 (10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10, or 10,000 cubic metres per second). This is equivalent to a few hundred tonnes per second in mass. An eruption with a 17 kilometre plume could have a discharge rate of 107 to 108 m3s-1, meaning that it is producing between 100 and 1000 times more material every second. These calculations are obviously only rough, and there are lots of complicating factors such as local weather conditions, the presence of ice over the vent and whether this comparison is even appropriate for the Eyjafjallajökull plume which was not as sustained.
If it’s so big, why is there so little fuss?
The Eyjafjallajökull eruption closed European airspace and cost billions of Euros. This eruption is much bigger, but so far only Keflavik airport (Iceland) is closed and the story is beneath the groundbreaking “Footballer Has Affair” on the BBC front page. The difference in impact on aviation comes down to three factors: the ash being produced by the eruption, the weather patterns blowing the ash around, and new rules about planes flying into....MORE
The current volcanic eruption in Grímsvötn on Vatnajökull glacier is the largest in that volcano 100 years and larger than the one in Eyjafjallajökull last year. It is similar to the eruption of 1873, according to geophysicist Magnús Tumi Gudmundsson. A large flood is not expected.The government appears concerned about the potential hit to tourism. Again, Iceland Review:
The current eruption in Grímsvötn is larger in scale than the eruption in Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, according to geophysicist Magnús Tumi Gudmundsson. Photo of the eruption in Eyjafjallajökull by Bjarni Brynjólfsson.This morning the ash cloud was 15 to 18 kilometers high which means that the volcanic eruption is ten times more powerful than the last eruption in Grímsvötn in 2004, Gudmundsson told ruv.is.
However, it is not unique. Grímsvötn goes through phases where it erupts often in a period of 60-80 years, then there are quieter periods of equal length.
In these quieter phases there are small eruptions such as the ones in 1998 and 2004 and then the third and fourth eruption are larger in scale, like in 1619 and in 1873, which is similar in character as the one we’re experiencing now.
It is much larger with much more magma flow and much more emission of ash than what we witnessed in the volcanic eruption in Eyjafjallajökull last year. The ash scatters widely and the ash cloud stretches over a large part of the country....MORE
Official sources:Grímsvötn volcano in the middle of Vatnajökull glacier is the most active volcano in Iceland. Since 1920 the eruptions have been in 1922, 1933, 1934, 1938, 1945, 1954, 1983, 1998 and 2004. Many of the eruptions have lasted from one to three weeks, the 2004 eruption lasted only four days.Eruptions in Grímsvötn often lead to floods in Skeidará. In 1996 an eruption occurred in an area between Grímsvötn and Bárdarbunga, a mountain in Vatnajökull. The eruption lead to floods that washed away a bridge over a river. The extent was up to 67 cubic kilometers and the flow up to 40 thousand cubic meters per second....MORE
Mökkurinn sést víða af Suðuarlandi. mynd/Halldóra K. Unnarsdóttir(easy for you to say)
„Það er alltaf full ástæða til að athuga alla möguleika þegar Grímsvötn gjósa, því þau eru mjög öflug eldstöð þó síðustu gos hafi verið mjög meinlaus,“ segir Páll Einarsson jarðeðlisfræðingur við Jarðvísindastofnun Háskóla Íslands.
Að sögn Páls hefur gosið verið lengi í pípunum. „Það hefur verið jafn og þéttur undirbúningur frá síðasta gosi árið 2004, því eftir að því lauk fóru Grímsvötnin strax að búa sig undir næsta gos.“ Þrýstingurinn í eldstöðinni hafi farið fram úr því sem hann var við gosið 2004 strax síðasta haust og kom þá hlaup úr vötnunum. Hófust þá vangaveltur um að gos myndi hefjast hvað úr hverju....
Well, it looks like Iceland is going to be in the news again this summer. Jon Frimann and others noted a sharp increase in seismicity under the Vatnajökull icecap at Grímsvötn today and MBL.is has confirmed that if an eruption hasn't already begun under the icecap, then one is likely to be starting soon (in Icelandic, use Google Translate at your risk) according to geologist Louw Sveinbjörnsson.I'm a bit sad that it wasn't the big one Katla, or Bárðarbunga, dude not to be confused with Berlusconi's Bunga-bunga but lending itself to a lot more wordplay than Eyjafjallajökull ever did.
UPDATE: There is confirmation of an ash and steam plume possibly reaching 1.8 km / ~6,000 feet above the volcano (see images below), but again, the details are scant. The eruption itself appears to be from the Grímsfjall Crater. There is very little news that I can find in English for this event - but hopefully Jon and any one else in Iceland can keep us appraised with what is going on in Iceland. The danger now will be from jokulklaups within the next 10-12 hours draining to the south or ash disrupting air travel in and around Iceland.
UPDATE 4:35 PM (Eastern): Icelandic officials and volcanologists will head out tomorrow morning (Icelandic) to overfly to inspect the area. However, a group near the volcano (Icelandic) will try to collect some samples of the ash. Police have also monitoring roads that could be hit by jokulhlaups. Also, currently the plume shows up impressively on satellite infrared images of Iceland.
MSNBC and the AP now has news on the eruption - and MSNBC claims the plume has hit 5.4 km / 18,000 feet in height. Impressive to say the least....MORE
Jim Grant quotes obscure dead economists at length. He pines for an earlier time of gas lights and top hats when the dollar was convertible to gold. He wears bowties.HT: MarketBeat who begins his post:
Prolific author, gold bug, droll chronicler of Wall Street folly, Grant would be easy to dismiss as an entertaining but irrelevant throwback if he hadn't been proven so right so often. Now, as small investors are putting more money into markets, the publisher of the biweekly Grant's Interest Rate Observer is warning of new dangers. He says prices are too high for nearly every asset you can think of — stocks, junk bonds, Treasury bonds, British gilts, even Iowa corn fields.
With its wry observations about investor self-delusion, Grant's newsletter ($910 for an annual subscription) has become a sort of bible among the bold and bearish alike. Though detractors say he's far too negative, he's been praised for some timely calls. In the 1980s, he warned of an overheated junk bond market before it collapsed. He foretold of the bursting of the tech bubble in the late 1990s, and revealed the false alchemy of Wall Street's mortgage packaging business before housing crashed four years ago.
Occasionally, he's gotten bullish at the right time, too. Amid the panicked selling of late 2008, Grant told readers to load up on investment grade bonds, junk bonds, even a few of those much-derided mortgage securities. Some picks have more than doubled since....
...Q: What's your view of the stock market?
A: The Federal Reserve has unilaterally taken it upon itself to levitate asset prices. It is suppressing interest rates. When you're not getting anything on your savings, you are inclined to go out and buy something, anything, to generate either income or the expectation of capital gains. So the things that we take as prices freely determined are in fact manipulated.
A few months ago, (Fed Chairman) Ben S. Bernanke, Ph.D., the former chairman of the Princeton economics department, stood before the cameras of CNBC and said that the Russell 2000 is making new highs. The Russell! He sounded like another stock jockey. He was taking credit for new highs in the small cap equities index. The Fed, as never before, or rarely before, is now the steward of this bull market. One wonders what it will do if stocks pull back significantly.
Q: Are stocks overvalued?
A: Some big multinationals left behind in the past ten years (like) Wal-Mart, Cisco Systems, Johnson & Johnson appear to be attractively priced. But generally speaking, things are rich....MORE
In a new interview with the Associated Press, legendary bond maven Jim Grant says stocks are overpriced, as are gold and bonds, the Fed should be shut down, depressions should be allowed to happen, and those kids should get off of his lawn....MORE
