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Strategies & Market Trends : Natural Resource Stocks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: c.hinton who wrote (5684)	12/30/2003 11:35:16 AM
From: c.hinton	Respond to of 108556

from telegraph:It takes a planetful of fivers to meet pension pledges for state employees If we sold Britain, here is what we could buy..... What am I bid for the United Kingdom? The whole works, from England's green and pleasant land, clouded hills, satanic mills and des. reses to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland? The answer, according to the Office for National Statistics, is that the lucky buyer would see little change from £5trillion, or 1,000,000,000,000 fivers, more enough to stretch from the UK to Mars and back to rescue a beagle in a hole. It is, of course, a thoroughly fatuous statistic, and breaks down into similarly whacky numbers which merely demonstrate why we are so obsessed with house prices, since 55pc of the national value is in bricks and mortar. There are lots of things you could buy with £5trillion, but it makes more sense to look at the value of what we produce each year, which adds up to about £1trillion. This is a real number, and unlike the ONS, currency analyst Neil Record has been doing some real sums to put it in perspective. Mr Record has been looking again at the real cost of the promises to government employees of index-linked pensions. These promises were given freely, almost carelessly, to teachers, civil servants, NHS employees, police, firemen and soldiers, and the Government Actuary tries to keep track of their likely cost. His latest figure, at March last year, is £380billion, nearly 10pc higher than in March 2001. To get to this number, he has discounted the value of the payments, from when they fall due, back to today's prices. Mr Record points out that he has used a far higher rate of discount than investors in the long gilts market, who are happy to get 2pc plus inflation for a risk-free stock. Do the pension sums this way, and the answer comes out at £470billion, or nearly half Britain's annual output. That's more than the National Debt, and, unlike the National Debt, it cannot be inflated away by printing money. It's an alarming insight into the size of the Government's hidden liabilities. Perhaps we're going to need that £5trillion after all. Planetful of fivers needed to meet state pension pledges \| Lego faces a great deal of hod work \| M&S caught with its cargo pants down

To: c.hinton who wrote (5684)	12/30/2003 6:18:38 PM
From: Jim Willie CB	Respond to of 108556

giant move in Canadian Dollar today this is part of what I call the HAT TRICK Can$ rises the commodity rises (take your pick: gold, silver, oil, gas) the firm discovers new deposits stockcharts.com[h,a]daclyyay[dc][pb50!d20,2!f][vc60][iUb14!Uh15,5,5]&pref=G this is a huge run in 4 sessions, closing on a breakout with the momentum swing evident here, I see a target of at least 80 perhaps unwinding the C$ setback after the new prime minister who knows? C$ had no business pulling back so much in December / jim