By Stephen Roach (from Zurich) Oct 07, 2005 Source The end of an era is nearly at hand. After nearly 18 1/2 years on the job, Alan Greenspan is required under law to step down at the end of his full term as Fed governor on January 31, 2006. Akin to the election of a new pope, the changing of the guard at the Fed is a rare and important event for the US and world financial system. In the pastby archive - Archive
By Axel Merk April 18th 2005 Source This article was written by Merk Investments before the Merk Hard Currency Fund was launched. Last year, Paul O'Neill in his book on his days as U.S. Treasury Secretary wrote that he had the TV business channel CNBC running all day in his office. There is nothing wrong with a Treasury Secretary observing the news, but he is the one who should be settingby archive - Archive
"Most recently, the (US) government has handed out $2000 to many victims of hurricane Katrina in the form of prepaid debit cards. While the motivations are honorable, this is very much akin to throwing money out of helicopters as Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan’s potential successor Ben Bernanke has promoted as a possibility to boost an economy at risk of deflation." Will China’s gby archive - Archive
By Dan Ackman, 01.07.05 Source Alan Greenspan, that Matador of the Money Supply, the esteemed Impresario of Interest Rates, has suffered precious few slings or arrows over his many years as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Even the White House has had to offer its critiques off the record for fear of roiling the markets or upsetting the chairman's Elvis-in-Vegas-like following. So when theby archive - Archive
By Tom Dyson March 23, 2005 Source A banker once told us that a bank's only concern is the solvency of its debtors. Interest rate risk is not a factor, he told us, because banks can hedge that risk...so as long as its customers aren't going bankrupt, a bank will always be okay. In normal circumstances, our banker friend may be quite right. But in decade three of the wby archive - Archive
Author: Jim Sinclair October 13, 2005 Source Refco's position as the largest independent derivative dealer with billions of dollars in customers' money, declared a moratorium on withdrawing assets or funds today. That's analogous to a run on the bank with your once friendly banker slamming the front door in your face. This is a very serious situation, not so much because of theby archive - Archive
By Rodney Gedda 24/10/2005 07:15:53 Source IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura. Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his juby archive - Archive
By YURI KAGEYAMA, AP Business Writer Wednesday, October 26, 2005 Source (10-26) 04:28 PDT ATSUGI, Japan (AP) -- We wield remote controls to turn things on and off, make them advance, make them halt. Ground-bound pilots use remotes to fly drone airplanes, soldiers to maneuver battlefield robots. But manipulating humans? Prepare to be remotely controlled. I was. Just imagine being rendered theby archive - Archive
Some thoughts on storm tracking and ties to electrical phenomenon of interest, both pertaining to electrical properties of hurricanes as well as their interaction with the electrical component of humans. "Energetically speaking, the vortex that forms in these storms is also a natural particle accelerator, and a massive capacitor bank. As the harmonic circuit develops, it resonates aby archive - Archive
By JOHN MARKOFF Published: October 26, 2005 Source SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 26 - A team of Stanford electrical engineers has discovered how to modulate, or switch on and off, a beam of laser light up to a 100 billion times a second with materials that are widely used in the semiconductor industry. The group used a standard chip-making process to design a key component of optical networking gear poteby archive - Archive
Oct 20th 2005 From The Economist print edition Source Intellectual-property protection can be good for the technology industry as well as for its customers, says Kenneth Cukier. But it requires careful handling “The granting patents ‘inflames cupidity’, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inveby archive - Archive
The clockwork computer Sep 19th 2002 From The Economist print edition Source An ancient piece of clockwork shows the deep roots of modern technology WHEN a Greek sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny island of Antikythera in 1900, it was the statues lying on the seabed that made the greatest impression on him. He returned to the surface, removedby archive - Archive
The Daily Reckoning London, England Thursday, October 20, 2005 The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: How can inflation be so low over the past few years if we see rising energy prices, ever-increasing medical costs - and especially, the cost of housing rising so dramatically? John Mauldin looks to answer this questions - and more... INFLATING THE NUMBERS by John Mauldin Source For the first time weby archive - Archive
"...For Velikovsky, this was the beginning of a personal "dark age". But remarkably, his friendship with Albert Einstein was unaffected, and Einstein met with him often, maintaining an extended correspondence as well, encouraging Velikovksy to look past the misbehavior of the scientific elite. In discussion with Einstein, Velikovsky predicted that Jupiter would be found to emit radby archive - Archive
"And the final one, all equally likely, scenario four. Just possibly ... a leap of consciousness ... by an entire generation. Only the third time in history this will have happened. A leap of consciousness to a new conscious plateau, we begin to think of ourselves, not as a nation, not as a series of ethnic and religious groups, we begin to think of ourselves as a species ... housed among maby archive - Archive
Stephen Roach (New York) Oct 10, 2005 Source Delphi’s bankruptcy is a big deal. It is emblematic of a new set of pressures bearing down on the US. The global rebalancing framework that I continue to embrace suggests that the world’s growth and asset return dynamic has only just begun a major tilt away from the US and dollar-based assets. If that’s the case, America will have little to offer iby archive - Archive
By Stephen Roach (New York) Oct 17, 2005 Source We’ve learned a lot about inflation in the past 35 years. From the double-digit price increases of the 1970s to a close brush with deflation in 2003, the inflation saga has gone through a remarkable transformation. The interplay between globalization and new IT-enabled technologies changes the very context of the inflation debate. Financial markby archive - Archive
By Tom Becker Source Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) -- Refco Inc., the futures broker under investigation for hiding a $430 million debt, filed for court protection from creditors in the fourth-largest U.S. bankruptcy. Shares of Refco plunged, wiping out about $905 million in market value, after the company asked a U.S. bankruptcy court in Manhattan for permission to reorganize its $48.6 billion in liabiby archive - Archive
Watching a $4 billion company fall apart in a week. By Daniel Gross Posted Monday, Oct. 17, 2005, at 2:52 PM PT Source If you want to know what a modern bank run looks like, consider the case of the giant commodity trading firm Refco. It went public in mid-August, but in the course of the past week it has gone from $4 billion stock-market darling to carcass. The proximate cause of the meltdownby archive - Archive
Tuesday October 18, 4:25 pm ET Source RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 18, 2005--Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT - News), the world's leading provider of open source to the enterprise, announced today that Bob Young, co-founder and former executive of Red Hat, has decided to resign from the Red Hat Board of Directors. Young, who founded the company in 1993, served as an executive at Red Hat untiby archive - Archive
"bodyguard of lies" -- Churchill GEOPOLITICAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT By Stratfor The Importance of the Plame Affair By George Friedman 10.17.2005 There are three rules concerning political scandal in the United States. First, every administration has scandals. Second, the party in opposition will always claim that there has never been an administration as corrupt as the one currentlby archive - Archive
By Rodney Gedda 14/10/2005 Source While rumours still abound about whether Google plans to offer its own online office suite to compete with Microsoft Office, at least one of the search giant's engineers is forecasting a time when today's native client applications will be delivered through the browser. Speaking at a Sydney University school of information technologies seminar, Googleby archive - Archive
By Henry C K Liu Sep 29, 2005 Source The repo market is the biggest financial market today. Domestic and international repo markets have grown dramatically over the past few years because of increasing need by market participants to take and hedge short positions in the capital and derivatives markets; a growing concern over counterparty credit risk; and the favorable capital-adequacy tby archive - Archive
By Henry C K Liu Sep 14, 2005 Source The Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank annual symposium at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is a ritual in which central bankers from major economies all over the world, backed by their supporting cast of court jesters masquerading as monetary economists, privately rationalize their unmerited yet enormous power over the fate of the global economy by publicly confesby archive - Archive
By Henry C K Liu May 26, 2005 Source After oil prices peaked above US$58 a barrel in early April, and stayed around their current $50 range, the White House announced that it wanted oil to go back down to $25 a barrel. There is a common misconception in life that if only things could go back to the ways they were in the good old days, life would be good again like in the good old days. Unby archive - Archive
By Henry C K Liu May 23, 2002 Source Recession in advanced economies, induced by the oil shock of 1973, pushed transnational banks to find borrowers in developing economies to accommodate petro-dollar recycling. That marked the beginning of finance globalization which, among other trends, replaced foreign aid with foreign loans to developing countries. In the beginning, the petro-dollar recyclinby archive - Archive
By Henry C K Liu Aug 1, 2002 Source There is a general rule about the way society treats criminals: place responsibility for antisocial acts on the individual, thus absolving society from blame. The mismatch between society's attitude toward heroes and criminals rests in society's claim of credit on heroes and rejection of responsibility for criminals. A criminal is one who haby archive - Archive
A broker battered Oct 14th 2005 From The Economist Global Agenda Source The boss of Refco, one of America’s leading futures brokers, has been arrested on fraud charges a couple of months after the firm’s successful flotation. The scandal may damage the reputation of an industry that has lately begun to forge an image of respectability IN AUGUST, investors happily stumped up $583mby archive - Archive
By Arthur C. Clarke September 24, 2005 Source WHEN NEIL ARMSTRONG stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquillity in that historic summer of 1969, the science fiction writers had already been there for two thousand years. But history is always more imaginative than any prophet: no one ever dreamt that the first chapter of lunar exploration would end after only a dozen men had walked upon the Moon. Neitby archive - Archive
Old Dominion University September 27, 2005 Source News of a “plasma pencil” developed by Old Dominion University researcher Mounir Laroussi was flashing through the World Wide Web in late September, adding to his reputation as a pioneer in the field of cold plasmas. PhysicsWeb noted Laroussi’s creation of a “hand-held device that can produce room-temperature plasmas … to kill bacteria, heal wouby archive - Archive