George, thanks for the post. They love their G3s at my friend's UC-Berkeley genetics lab too.
To conserve bandwidth here, let me add this snip from Jim Cramer today on the near-term future of the yen:
Put simply, I think the yen is in the fight for its life. I had been musing that this currency is about as sickly as I have ever seen, and then Ron Insana, who is quietly doing some of the most brilliant work on television at CNBC, brought up the thesis yesterday of hedge funds going against the Japanese central bank to break the currency, in the same way they went against the Thai baht, or a few years back, against the British pound.
At first I thought it fanciful. The U.S. government would never stand for it. But when I looked over the last half-dozen statements emanating from Washington by Rubin and Summers, I realized that these guys have given tacit approval of a run against the yen by their constant berating of the Japanese central bank.
Japan has massive reserves, but this currency is overvalued by probably 50 yen to the dollar. Talk about a pincer move: We threaten to block exports from Japan domestically, while international hedge funds bang the yen to 175 or 180 on the dollar. That would force structural change on Japan as its exports would pile up, courtesy of tariffs, and Japan would at last have to stimulate domestic demand with tax cuts. |
