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

To: ild who wrote (41566)	9/14/2005 9:03:59 PM
From: FiveFour	Respond to of 110194

anyone planning to attend? Volatility: Measuring and profiting from the price of uncertainty October 27 - 28, 2005 - The Dorchester Hotel, London, UK iqpc.co.uk;

To: ild who wrote (41566)	9/14/2005 9:08:45 PM
From: patron_anejo_por_favor	Respond to of 110194

Wow....Soylent Greenspan's in full-blown CYA mode prior to retirement now, I see..... In the case of [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac], excessive caution in reducing their portfolios could prove to be destabilizing to our financial system as a whole and in the end could seriously diminish the availability of home mortgage funds." It is of course bullish. EVERYTHING is bullish, in it's own way.<G>

To: ild who wrote (41566)	9/15/2005 12:05:08 AM
From: CalculatedRisk	Respond to of 110194

Dr. Setser: Time to change the way we think about the world rgemonitor.com China's August goods exports: $68 billion US July goods exports: $75 billion China should start exporting more goods than the USA in late 2005/ early 2006. <MORE COMMENTARY>

To: ild who wrote (41566)	9/15/2005 1:03:27 AM
From: Jim McMannis	Respond to of 110194

Do nothing greenspan and then issue a warning. That's protecting the economy if I've every seen it...not.

To: ild who wrote (41566)	9/15/2005 7:17:10 AM
From: Crimson Ghost	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Faber Sees Nikkei 225 Rising 40% (Update2) Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Japan's Nikkei 225 Stock Average may climb 40 percent in three years as the government pushes ahead with the breakup of the postal service, releasing $3.2 trillion of savings to banks and insurers, Marc Faber said. The benchmark may rise to 18,000 in the ``next two to three years,'' Faber, author of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, said in an interview on Sept. 13. The Nikkei closed at 12,972.96 yesterday. It rose 1.2 percent to 12,986.78 today in Tokyo, its highest close since June 2001. ``The Japanese share market will strongly outperform New York in the next five years,'' said Faber, who oversees about $300 million at Hong Kong-based Marc Faber Ltd. ``The enormous cash reserves from private households and companies, the money they keep under their mattresses, will flow into the economy.'' Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi won a landslide election victory on Sept. 11, giving him a mandate to sell Japan Post, whose 350 trillion yen ($3.17 trillion) in assets make it the world's largest savings bank. His Liberal Democratic Party captured a single-party majority in the lower house for the first time since an election in 1990. ``The LDP now has the tools for real reform,'' said Mats Sjostrom, who helps manage $450 million at Er Capital Management Ltd., a hedge fund based in Helsinki, Finland. ``International investors will be expecting that to significantly increase allocations to Japan.'' A bill to proceed with the Japan Post sale will be submitted in an extraordinary parliamentary session to start on Sept. 21. Under the government's proposal, a holding company will be formed to manage two companies and two financial service institutions on April 1, 2007. The financial service arms will receive banking and insurance licenses. `Clear Victory' Selling Japan Post would put its assets out of reach of politicians who have used its cash to fund public works, boosting national debt. The government projects debt to reach 151 percent of gross domestic product by March 2006, the highest in the industrialized world. Faber, 59, has invested in Asia since 1973. The self- declared ``contrarian'' became well known for being bearish on Asian assets before the Asian financial crisis in 1997 caused markets in the region, including those in Malaysia and South Korea, to collapse. His bullish view on Japan is shared by other investors. Fund managers in a Merrill Lynch & Co. survey released two days ago said they were favoring shares in Japan because Asia's biggest economy has the best outlook for corporate earnings. `Icing on the Cake' Investors from outside Japan in the five days ended Sept. 2 bought 218.2 billion yen more of the country's shares than they sold, the exchange said Sept. 8. It was the 11th consecutive week that foreigners were net buyers. ``The next year is likely to be very exciting for the Japanese market as continued restructuring by older firms takes place and Koizumi's reforms introduce improved productivity,'' said Paul Heaton, who helps manage $550 million in Japanese equities at Royal London Asset Management in London. Banks, brokers and retailers are ``likely to benefit from improved domestic demand.'' CLSA Ltd.'s Christopher Wood, the top-ranked Asian equity strategist in Institutional Investor's 2005 poll, recommends investors hold shares of companies including Mizuho Financial Group Inc. and Mitsubishi Estate Co. ``The fundamental factor is that banks and property are getting better,'' Wood said in a Sept. 12 interview at CLSA's annual investor conference in Hong Kong. ``The election is a positive icing on the cake. This is an enormous personal mandate for Koizumi. He can do pretty much what he wants right now.'' `Very Positive' Koizumi's administration has pushed construction programs in central Tokyo and cut property-sales taxes in an effort to boost growth. Land prices rose last year in Tokyo for the first time since 1992. Under Koizumi, banks have made efforts to reduce trillions of dollars in bad debt. The seven biggest banks had 7.4 trillion yen of bad loans at March 31, down from 13.6 trillion yen a year earlier, Japan's banking regulator said in July. Faber forecast in May 2002 that Japanese stocks would perform better than the U.S. as Japan's economy, the world's second largest, recovered. Since the end of May 2002, the Topix index climbed 17 percent through yesterday, while the U.S. Standard & Poor's 500 Index gained 15 percent. Japan's economy grew at an annualized 3.3 percent pace in the second quarter, three times the government's initial estimate, as capital spending grew faster than expected, according to figures from the Cabinet Office on Sept. 12. ``I'm very positive regarding Japan's markets,'' Faber said.

To: ild who wrote (41566)	9/15/2005 10:10:44 AM
From: John Vosilla	Respond to of 110194

"Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his strongest warning yet, said in a recent letter that Wall Street investment firms eventually could be incapable of hedging all the financial risk posed by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, if Congress doesn't impose meaningful limits on them." I guess he was looking the other way as no money down, stated income, negative amortization, 1% pay rates and ultra lax underwriting became the norm within the last few years. Ownership society on steroids.

To: ild who wrote (41566)	9/15/2005 2:32:08 PM
From: ild	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 110194

Date: Thu Sep 15 2005 11:35 trotsky (@silver & ted butler's recent missives) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved as always, there is a lot to agree with, but also a bit of fuzzy thinking. for instance, TB keeps comparing the above ground silver supply to the above ground gold supply. as previously mentioned, this makes no sense. you could just as well argue that copper should trade higher than gold - after all, its known above ground supply covers perhaps three or four months worth of demand. where Ted Butler normally shines is in his analysis of the CoT structure, but even there i don't agree with everything. for instance, i don't think that the much derided 'brainless tech funds' are really losing all the time to the commercial hedgers. think about it - silver rose from $4 to nearly $8, and the hedgers were net short throughout the entire advance, while the speculators maintained the offsetting net long position. true, when their net long exposure gets too large, a short term reversal is usually at hand, but staying net long during a big advance surely means you make more money than you lose. the longer term outlook for silver is likely positive on account of the primary supply/demand deficit continuing to erode stockpiles - i agree with that. what i have more difficulty agreeing with is that a huge undetected conspiracy has actively manipulated the silver price for the past two decades in spite of there not being enough physical supply. Occam's razor applied to this situation says that the silver inventories that were used to fill the primary deficit have been far larger than anyone suspected. for instance, neither European silver traders nor China's government publish their inventory levels, so all we have are educated guesses by the Silver Institute and similar agencies. however, it is inevitable that those inventories will be run down in the face of a primary deficit over time. it has just taken a lot longer than suspected. this does not take away from the fact that it's a long term bullish fundamental datum, but at the same time suggests an explanation for silver's previous dismal performance. note also that up until the '99-'00 period, ALL commodities had been mired in strong secular downtrends for the previous 20 years, so why would silver be excepted. anyway, coming back the the current silver CoT report, whether it is or isn't bullish remains to be seen. the funds didn't increase their short positions without a reason, and i suspect the main reason has been the chart, namely the break of the uptrend on the weekly chart. in order for silver to rise, we need them to change their mind and hop back on the long side. this means in turn that silver needs to regain its broken trendline decisively. this has not happened yet, and from a technical perspective it makes no sense to turn short term bullish until it does, regardless of the CoT report. as an aside, i suspect that some of the fund short positions in silver may be intended as a hedge against long positions in the gold contract. lastly, if the economy turns down ( and recent economic reports have suggested a slowdown was beginning even before Katrina hit, which will now be exacerbated in the wake the storm ) , gold can be expected to begin outperforming ALL other commodities, including silver. this is because gold reacts immediately to a widening yield curve and changing expectations regarding the direction of real interest rates, whereas industrial commodities tend to react with a considerable lag to such a development. normally they lead the economy down as well as up, so that if e.g. the next recession were to officially begin in qu.2 of 2006 , industrial commodity prices should be expected to turn down, especially relative to gold, well before that time. all of which suggests that it is not entirely unreasonable for the specs to add to their shorts in silver ( otoh, if silver DOES regain its weekly uptrend line, the covering of those shorts can certainly be expected to give the price an extra boost ) . Date: Thu Sep 15 2005 10:48 trotsky (silverfox, 9:42) ID#248269: Copyright © 2002 trotsky/Kitco Inc. All rights reserved the short version of that reply is 'i have no evidence'. that said, we're not totally without evidence. some of the data put together by Reg Howe , Turk et al. do look suspicious and suggest that central banks remain in the business of 'managing' the gold price. as we have seen that has had zero effect, as the up trend from the '00 low has developed like every other normal bull market would. this in turn tells us that worrying about it is a waste of time...