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

To: THE ANT who wrote (71969)	3/14/2011 11:14:30 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217795

Hi klaser. Carnaval was created for an extremely conservative Roman Catholic society. Brazil 19th century. For 3 days people could release the pressure. The blacks could throw water in the whites. People would congregate at the streets and played around... On Ash Wednesday all people back to the church. Church was -then- not yet separated from the state. The secular and temporal powers knew what they were doing... Moslems need a carnaval they would release the pressure. An example close to homw: Americans did something similar in the 60s when people got fed up with the old social ways OK all that 19th century thing became that money making machine we have today.

To: THE ANT who wrote (71969)	3/26/2011 5:58:30 AM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217795

I had a look on this "Credit card balances increased 30% in Brazil between 2008 and 2009, as the country races to join the global middle class. If there is a credit crisis building in the developing world, Brazil could take the hardest fall." theatlantic.com Then I looked at this:

To: THE ANT who wrote (71969)	4/9/2011 3:48:28 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217795

What happens once he accepts defeat on currency war? Hot money is burning emerging market fingers Currency war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. That might, at least, be the moral that Guido Mantega, Brazil’s finance minister, takes from the past few days. More than anyone else, he has come to personify emerging market disquiet at the dollar’s devaluation and the rise of their own currencies. This makes it harder for emerging markets’ export-led economies, while giving the US an artificial boost. Mr Mantega has complained about this alleged warlike behaviour more aggressively than anyone else – and he has also done more about it. Rather than just complain, he launched a series of taxes and charges aimed at discouraging flows of “hot money” from foreign investors into Brazil. But they had minimal effect: the Brazilian real continued its ascent against the dollar and Mr Mantega eventually sued for peace, admitting this week that “appreciation of the Brazilian real is unavoidable”. The market took him at his word and the real has now risen to its strongest level against the dollar since the summer of 2008. Regaining its all-time high, set in the unsustainable emerging markets bubble that preceded the global crash of 2008, requires a gain of less than 1 per cent. Brazil is not alone. Korean authorities have tried to limit the rise of the Korean won against the dollar – but it is also at a 2.5-year high. Away from the emerging markets, the dollar’s level against a trade-weighted index of its biggest trading partners is less than 6 per cent above the low it plumbed shortly before the Lehman Brothers collapse. Even the euro has gained 8.6 per cent on the dollar this year – impressive in the week that Portugal asked for a bail-out to help pay its sovereign debt. The eurozone’s debt crisis had been seen, quite correctly, as threatening the very existence of the euro and the crisis surrounding Greek sovereign debt a year ago prompted a sharp decline for the single currency. But no longer. Many regard gold as the ultimate currency. The gold price also says that the dollar has been adulterated, hitting a fresh all-time high in nominal terms this week. What is the lead weight that keeps pulling the dollar downwards? There are several. Two short-term factors from this week have tugged it on its way. The Washington standoff over the US budget, with a potential government shutdown in its wake, was still continuing when this column went to press. The politics of the shutdown have been melodramatic, and its possible effects overstated, but it plainly weakened the dollar. Second, there is the environment for interest rates. Two years of total inactivity on the rate front by the west’s biggest central banks came to an end this week as the European Central Bank raised its policy rate from 1 per cent to 1.25 per cent. The Federal Reserve, whose Fed Funds rate is between zero and 0.25 per cent, is still some months away from tightening. This was not a surprise when it happened, but it is still a big deal. It is the first time in the ECB’s relatively brief history that it has taken the lead in starting to tighten monetary policy, rather than waiting for the Fed. There is room for debate between inflation’s hawks and doves, but plainly the ECB is a better bet than the Fed to raise rates and to combat inflation; and on both counts, that points to a stronger euro and a weaker dollar. But more broadly, the weak dollar is the market’s best way to express its fears about inflation, and its differential effects. Commodity prices are shooting up – Brent crude has gained one-third this year, and is up 245 per cent since it bottomed out at the end of 2008. That inflation is afflicting the emerging world but not – as yet – the developed world. It is the result of resource constraints, as hungry mouths demand more, as well as cheap money. Countries afflicted by inflation must raise interest rates. That pushes their currencies up compared with the dollar, the currency of an economy that in spite of some signs of life looks rather anaemic. An appreciating currency in itself, as Mr Mantega said this week, will help in the battle against inflation. This has not stopped an impressive post-crisis recovery for stock markets. The FTSE-All World stock index has doubled in the past two years. But that is in dollar terms. It may be more accurate to view the world through the lens of the Brazilian real. The rally of the past two years has been bought with exceptionally low interest rates and has led to higher commodity prices. Those factors cancel out the apparent healthy gains made for dollar-based investors, leaving a gain of little more than 20 per cent for real-based investors since the stock market nadir two years ago. If emerging markets are now admitting defeat in the currency war, and let their currencies appreciate, it implies something still uglier. The countries that have driven the great recovery are overheating.