Wednesday, January 7, 2004
The Great Californian Budget Deficit Mystery - Solved?
Here's one to ponder. During the recall in California and the subsequent race to take the governership, Grey Davis was pilloried, heckled and ridiculed for presiding over a state that was $28 billion in the red, and more often stated in the media as "almost $30 billion". Nice round figures have a...
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Tuesday, January 6, 2004
Some Trends to Watch in 2004
* The Great Raw Materials Shortage of 2004. The move has started...In 2003, gold soared. So did oil (up 54%) and platinum (up 21%). But it?s only a matter of time before this natural resource boom spreads to palladium...coal...sugar...uranium...gas...and other in-demand raw materials... · The world...
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Friday, January 2, 2004
Coca Cola - Steals Water, Gives Away Toxic Sludge For Free!!
Some time back, Argee and I had an extended set-to about the scandal of Coca Cola using vast quantities of water for making and bottling fizzy drinks and mineral water in parts of India, to the extent that the water table is dropping, ancient wells are drying up, and villagers are now having to walk...
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More on the Massive Parmalat Fraud
WHEN Enrico Bondi, a turnaround expert, arrived at Parmalat in mid-December, he thought his job was merely to help restructure the finances of Italy’s biggest dairy group. Within days, however, events moved faster than even the shrewd Mr Bondi can have predicted. First, Calisto Tanzi, Parmalat’s...
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Wednesday, December 31, 2003
A Slow and Terminal Collapse?
Markets are built on trust. Nothing else really matters. Enron and WorldCom abused that trust massively. Shareholders get shafted. Pensioners are impoverished. And the fat cats at the top enjoy the spoils of their pillaging whilst waiting years for trials to come together (or collapse). Worse still...
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Wednesday, December 17, 2003
How's This For a Dodgy Trick?
The UK have been running inflation targets for some years now, and I believe that lately, we've been consistently beating a target set at around 3%. Fair menough. Last week, the way in which inflation is measured was changed. The actual calculation has been altered, and mortgage payments have been...
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Tuesday, December 9, 2003
How to Get Your Views Across
OK - you've had that newsletter for sixteen hours now, and time's up. You may already have figured that I was not impressed with some of the concepts and language used. And, if I say so myself, I can write a mean and scathing letter when I want to. This is it, emailed to The Team yesterday... Sirs,...
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Monday, December 8, 2003
I've Designed a A Fun Little Experiment - Just For You!!
I subscribe to a few email newsletters and analysis reports from various organisations for various reasons. (If you need more, I "Came Clean" in 'Fishing in the Rivers of Light" recently). And sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't, and Life goes on. I've had one through this evening I found...
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Sunday, December 7, 2003
Here's What REALLY Pisses Me Off About Tax
Our esteemed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, is making a statement to us this coming week. In it, he's expected to give some update as to how the economy is doing, how we're measuring up against the criteria for entering the Euro, and to warn us of the tax changes he's thinking about come...
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Thursday, December 4, 2003
CHAVEZ VERSUS THE FREE TRADE ZOMBIES OF THE AMERICAS
This just in from Greg Palast, reporting from Caracas "It's as if they were locked in a crypt for the last ten years. The finance ministers of every Latin American nation last week signed on to a resolution in principle to join the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the hemispheric expansion of...
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