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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (36548)	7/21/2005 10:39:57 PM
From: ild	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Date: Thu Jul 21 2005 17:28 trotsky (crazytimes) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved this is the deal: you can either match, or exceed, the bri...,err, contributions, that the pharmaceutical industry pays the political parasi.., err, representatives, then you might get to enjoy cheap prescription meds from Canada plus freely available dietary supplements, or not. then you won't. that's as far as i understand the situation anyhow. Date: Thu Jul 21 2005 15:55 trotsky (AU_NB) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved one more thing about the oil angle - although China's designs on Unocal may be for mercantilist reasons ( i.e.the grabbing of perceived strategic assets ) , in reality the fungibility of oil means that it doesn't really make a difference who owns a small producer like Unocal. availability of oil on a global basis is remains the same , regardless of who owns this company. if CNOOC's bid is primarily for commercial reasons, it makes certainly sense. in any case, this is materially different from an actual oil embargo...China will still enjoy the same access to oil as before, with or without Unocal. so imo the more important angle is what this says about the uses one is allowed to put the dollars one has accumulated to. Date: Thu Jul 21 2005 15:48 trotsky (AU_NB) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved it's an intriguing possibility to consider. otoh, the economic interdependence between the two countries is so well advanced that it is doubtful whether such an economic war would make sense. that said, if one looks at both the starting points and end results of historic wars, sense often doesn't play much of a role. still, if i read China's leadership correctly, their major concern is domestic stability, which they try to ensure by hook or crook. so my guess would be that their calculation goes along the lines of 'let's make a largely symbolic gesture that costs us very little, in order to avoid larger damage that could result from a trade war'. not to forget, it was the US Congress that began waving the trade war threat first, by proposing a large punitive tarrif unless China acted on the currency. so i'm not sure whether Unocal plays a role here....although by keeping Unocal off-limits to Chinese buyers the convertibility of the US dollar , its role as a claim on US assets , becomes somwhat dubious. a further line of reasoning could be that China expects the negative unintended consequences of the repeg to become so obvious that calls for further revaluation are forestalled. one thing is certain, the markets aren't too happy about it. for one thing, it's a political rather than an economic decision. plus, the arrangement in place thus far seems to have worked well ( i.e., it has not yet produced a situation that the markets interpreted as negative ) - so now it looks like something is being fixed that didn't need fixing from the PoV of the markets. we'll see how it all plays out of course, and it sure has made things more interesting than they were before... Date: Thu Jul 21 2005 15:25 trotsky (Snow is happy....) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved that the biggest supplier of goods to the US will henceforth charge higher prices. it's a strange world.