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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Maurice Winn who wrote (19252)6/5/2007 3:58:14 AM
From: elmatador  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217873
 
Return to natural size means USD is going to just another currency. Article explains one mechanism that can be exploited.

remember my picture so scale...



To: Maurice Winn who wrote (19252)6/5/2007 4:02:22 AM
From: elmatador  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217873
 
Here comes the price to pay: Czechs wary of U.S. missile system. LATAM knows that one should not cozy to the U.S.

There's a price to pay.

Czechs wary of U.S. missile system

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Russia isn't alone in disliking the idea of basing a U.S. missile defense system in the Czech Republic and other countries on its doorstep.


Most Czechs aren't happy about the proposal, either. Recent polls in this former Soviet satellite, now a democratic NATO ally, show more than 60 percent of the public in opposition.

President Bush arrived Monday evening in the stately old European capital of Prague for a day of meetings with Czech leaders.

The White House has billed a speech Bush will deliver from the local headquarters of Radio Free Europe on democracy as the highlight of his visit here. His Czech counterparts have complaints with Washington to discuss, such as a two-tiered visa system for European nations that leaves their citizens out in the cold.

However, the international debate over the missile defense system likely will drown out everything else during Bush's stay in Prague. The U.S. plan calls for an anti-missile radar base to be built at the Brdy military zone southwest of the capital.

For their part, Czech leaders have brushed off Russia's objections, remaining receptive to the project. Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek called it "a necessary step which will significantly increase our security and also the security of our European allies and neighbors."

Most Czech citizens, though, worry about Russian threats to embark on a new arms race in response, and they fear that the installation could make the tiny country a terrorist target.

In Prague last weekend, more than 1,000 people protested the plan. Demonstrators planned to show their displeasure again Tuesday outside medieval Prague Castle, where Bush was to meet with Topolanek and President Vaclev Klaus.

Over the weekend, Russian President Vladimir Putin stepped up already incendiary remarks about the U.S. and its intentions with the shield, warning that Moscow could take "retaliatory steps" including aiming nuclear weapons at U.S. military bases in Europe. Russia believes the shield in Eastern Europe is meant for it, and says it has no choice to boost its own military potential in response.

Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, called this sort of talk "not helpful."

Still, he, the president and other U.S. officials have sought to cool down the situation — to no avail. They insist the network is meant to protect NATO allies against a missile launch from Iran, not Russia.

The president's speech in Prague could stoke the fires further.

As part of taking stock of "the freedom agenda," Bush plans to mention Russia as a difficult area, Hadley told reporters traveling Monday with Bush to Europe on Air Force One.

"He'll talk a little bit about the challenge of promoting democracy in countries, big countries in particular, where we have a complex relationship and a number of interests, places like China and Russia," Hadley said.

He said the speech was not aimed at Russia, and that Bush would handle that bit of it "in a very responsible way."

Still, the remarks were not likely to be well-received by Putin, with whom Bush was scheduled to meet two days later in Germany on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit.

With the Iraq war raging and that country in disarray, some criticized Bush's effort to refocus attention on his "freedom agenda" — the byproduct of the president's promise to predicate U.S. relations with all nations on their treatment of their citizens and to advance democracy in every corner of the globe.

"The reality is the initiative is in disarray," said Grant Aldonas, an international business scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Commerce Department undersecretary in Bush's first term. "Following the outcome of Iraq postwar, when you travel the world, people react with cynicism when you talk about freedom and democracy at this point."

Bush's message is typically better received in small, newer democracies. The Czech Republic, for instance, has deployed troops to help support the U.S.-led campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush was invited to make the speech as part of a conference on democracy hosted by Natan Sharansky, a former prisoner of the Soviet regime who has continued to champion freedom, and former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who led the Velvet Revolution that ended communism in the former Czechoslovakia in 1989. The president also plans to meet with current and former dissidents from around the world.

From Prague, Bush was to travel to Germany's Baltic Sea resort town of Heiligendamm for three days of meetings between the leaders of the world's eight major industrialized democracies. The rest of his eight-day European trip was to include a stop in Poland — also a proposed site for part of the missile defense system — as well as visits to Italy, Albania and Bulgaria.



To: Maurice Winn who wrote (19252)6/5/2007 4:20:33 AM
From: elmatador  Respond to of 217873
 
Revaluing due to prosperity: policymakers are increasingly letting their currencies appreciate against the dollar.

That means it becomes costlier for USD and Euro to purchase the stuff produce by the emerging markets.

As a result, several mamatas end.

For instance the cars are sold internally and no exported cheap cheap.

Gave the example the other day to klaser in which, a Danish company was buying wood, shipping to Vietnam and making furniture there.
These guys are very good for the world economy mind you. They are the Lebanese of the world. Greasing the economy and making the best of cheap cheap materials and cheap man power and getting their cut of the deal.

I'm not saying that this is bad. I am just saying that this arbritraging will end as the cost of emerging market products increase.

This is execelent for the world's economy, because they now can purchase the products of the developed world.

Revaluing due to prosperity.
RUCHIR SHARMA

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ TUESDAY, JUNE 05, 2007 03:27:03 AM]

Central banks in emerging markets spent much of the past few decades pursuing an exchange rate policy that often read: “Undervaluing our way to prosperity”. But the power of capital inflows has been so overwhelming of late that the new policy paradigm seems to be more along the lines of: “Revaluing our way (due) to prosperity”.

From Brazil to Indonesia, policymakers are increasingly letting their currencies appreciate against the dollar. Several emerging market currencies have registered double-digit percentage gains over the past year, with the Brazilian real and the Turkish lira rising by nearly 20%. Similarly, currencies in other regions have notched up double-digit gains such as the Philippine peso and Thai baht in Asia and the Slovakia koruna in Eastern Europe — they have all revalued by around 15% in the last 12 months. The Indian rupee just about makes the cut of the world’s ten best-performing currencies, on the back of a 14% year-over-year gain.

Economic equations in the Middle East too were shaken up a fortnight ago when Kuwait became the first of the six Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC countries to drop its 14-year old peg against the dollar. After long resisting such a change, Kuwait finally succumbed to revaluation pressures in a bid to regain some control over its monetary policy. It was otherwise being forced to cut interest rates despite an accelerating inflation rate, just to prevent huge foreign inflows.

With several central banks explicitly adopting an inflation-targeting regime, it was only inevitable that policymakers would let the value of their currencies be more market-determined, given the threat of rising inflation in the advanced stages of the economic cycle. It is remarkable how many central banks in developing countries are now targeting an inflation rate in the range of 3 to 4%.

They haven’t quite forgotten the 1970s when most central bankers ran easy monetary policies to shore up domestic demand and by mistake accommodated the commodity price boom. In contrast, despite the sustained and pronounced increase in commodity prices in the current cycle, inflationary expectations have remained well anchored with the average inflation in developing countries currently at an all-time low of 5.5%.

While the predominant objective of central banks such as the Reserve Bank of India has been to control inflation, with the exchange rate acting as a tool in that effort, other central banks have been motivated by different factors in adjusting their currency management policy. For example, it was turning out to be too expensive for Banco Central Do Brasil, or BCB, to buy up to a billion dollars a day to keep to hold the real at 2.0 versus the dollar — an issue it faced earlier the year. With Brazilian interest rates still more than twice the level of US rates, the cost of sterilisation is rather prohibitive; Brazil’s $130 billion in foreign exchange reserves yield far less to the BCB than what the bank ends up paying on the domestic bonds it issues to mop up dollar liquidity.

Indonesia has been facing a similar predicament and has also allowed the rupiah to strengthen significantly against the dollar. The more relaxed exchange rate intervention policy has been further abetted by the continued encouraging performance on the export front despite a rapid rise in their currencies. Many developing countries are net commodity exporters and the surge in commodity prices has helped offset the potential negative effect from a rising exchange rate.

More interestingly, even in some commodity importing countries, such as in Eastern Europe, central banks have accepted upward pressure on their currencies as a natural consequence of a productivity boom. A strong reform momentum and continued benefits from greater integration with the European Union has led to very high productivity growth in Romania, Slovakia and other smaller Eastern European countries. Foreign direct investment flows have been gushing in, allowing these countries to easily finance large current account deficits.

In fact, the breakdown in the linkage between a current account deficit and exchange rate performance highlights how movements in the capital account are now completely overshadowing the current account. This is reducing the importance of exports in the economic equation; policymakers know they can get growth going through domestic demand in a low interest rate and a high productivity environment.




To: Maurice Winn who wrote (19252)6/5/2007 9:47:27 AM
From: TobagoJack  Respond to of 217873
 
duplicate



To: Maurice Winn who wrote (19252)6/5/2007 9:47:29 AM
From: TobagoJack  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217873
 
<<PS: TJ is going to get such a shock when his silly gold talismen become worth nothing but ornamentation and as an electrical contact and other materials applications. With a dropping population gold will drop in value to the marginal cost of production [but much lower until the huge stocks are cleared]>>

... make me laugh

gold has naught to do with body counts

gold has everything to do with how much paper money is about, and how worthless they are perceived to be

the marginal cost of production of fiat money is ... my, as burnandkaput once said on international television broadcast, nothing