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

To: carranza2 who wrote (37567)	7/26/2008 2:17:30 AM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217739

An ignored and acute world problem - population growth in poor countries and the lack of employment and food _____________________________________________________________ Egypt,has for decades dreamed of converting huge swaths of desert into lush farmland. The most ambitious of these projects is in Toshka, a Sahara Desert oasis in a scorched lunar landscape of sand and rock outcroppings. When the Toshka farm was started in 1997, the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, compared its ambitions to building the pyramids, involving roughly 500,000 acres of farmland and tens of thousands of residents. But no one has moved there, and only 30,000 acres or so have been planted. The farm's manager, Mohamed Nagi Mohamed, says the Sahara is perfect for farming, as long as there is plenty of fertilizer and water. For one thing, the bugs cannot handle the summer heat, so pesticides are not needed. "You can grow anything on this land," he said, showing off fields of alfalfa and rows of tomatoes and grapes, shielded from the sun by gauzy white netting. "It's a very nice project, but it needs a lot of money." Mubarak calls his country's growing population an "urgent" problem that has exacerbated the food crisis. The population grows about 1.7 percent annually, considerably slower than a generation ago but still fast enough that it is on pace to double by 2050. Adding 1.3 million Egyptians each year to the 77 million squeezed into an inhabited area roughly the size of Taiwan is a daunting prospect for a country in which 20 percent of citizens already live in poverty. One recent morning in the Cairo slum of Imbaba, people crammed in front of a weathered green bakery shack for their daily rations of subsidized bread, a pita-like loaf called baladi that sells for less than a penny, so cheap that some Egyptians feed it to their livestock. The bakery shares the end of a dead-end street with a mountain of garbage, 25 feet by 5 feet, that looks as if it is moving because so many flies swarm over it. From - International Herald Tribune

To: carranza2 who wrote (37567)	7/28/2008 5:40:15 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217739

just in in-tray player #1: In response to not being able to short the big financials, deep ITM options series are being opened up as a imperfect equivalent that shorts can sell instead An example -- there is now even a January $10 call in GS, which is trading at $180 -- finance.yahoo.com Clever people, these market makers :>) player #2: furthermore, now that opening straightforward short positions in these stocks has become impossible, their next decline won't be cushioned by short covering to the same extent as the last one was. this will likely help to make up for the slight premia embedded in itm calls. as a general rule, when government intervenes in the market place, expect unintended consequences to result and eventually become the major consequences.