Saudi Arabia planned to be able to produce 12.5m b/d within 2½ to three years, and 15m
b/d over the long term, he said. Mr Hadley spoke of 12.5m b/d by the end of the decade. Roger Diwan, oil markets expert at
PFC Energy, said that he believed the oil element of their discussions was cobbled together at the last minute because of
rising prices and public pressure, and that the two sides would have preferred to spend the time on issues they cared more
about.
The rhetorical flourishes of America’s central bankers have dug the US economy --
and by definition, a US-centric global economy -- into a deep hole. To this very day, the Fed has never confessed to
the Original Sin of condoning the equity bubble. On the contrary, Greenspan & Company have been on the defensive
ever since by dismissing the increasingly dangerous repercussions of the original post-bubble shakeout. Far from playing
the role of the tough guy that is required of independent central bankers, the Fed has become an advocate of the easy money
of a powerful liquidity cycle.
Today's global business is creating a new sort of worker, termed the “stealth expatriate”
in a recent worldwide survey by Cendant Mobility, a firm that helps firms to relocate employees. The survey found that 78%
of HR departments either have, or suspect they have, stealth expats within their firm. Yet 83% of these companies admit that
they do not have systems in place to track such people.
It comes as two separate bills, with some bipartisan support, have been introduced
into Congress in the past month seeking to penalise China with punitive tariffs because of "currency manipulation". The US
trade deficit with China is at a record high of more than $US162billion ($210billion), thanks to cheap Chinese goods flooding
the US market. China's gross domestic product rose 9.5 per cent from a year earlier to 3.14trillion yuan ($490billion), according
to the National Bureau of Statistics in Beijing.
It is only a question of time now, when the US FED has to lower again the FED Funds due
to extreme weakness of the US economy, especially in the previous stalwarts of the high tech industry. The US economy simply
cannot afford to pay a higher real rate on its currency. This will lower the real rate and further weaken the US dollar.
One of the alternatives was to offer investment credit -- which would allow investors
to obtain a higher recovery on the investment they had made before the wells start producing -- vice chairman of the Oil and
Gas Upstream Regulatory Agency (BP Migas) Kardaya Warnika said on Monday.
“The endgame is not in doubt, in my view. The American consumer will ultimately cave.
It is the only means by which the US will ever “fix” its twin saving and current account problems. It is the timing and circumstances
of that fix that we endlessly debate. But the clock is ticking -- especially now as interest rates and energy prices rise.
Yet another in a long string of crummy US labor market reports only serves to underscore the obvious: Excess consumption is
on a collision course with sub-par labor income growth. Courtesy of an unrelenting global labor arbitrage, the “big squeeze”
is getting tighter and tighter on the world’s only real consumer.” Now if you are an inflation proponent, I ask you. Is this
the condition of a runaway inflationary scenario? I think not.
Here is some perspective for us - Since 2001 2/3 of foreign capital invested in the U.S.
has headed for Treasury and agency debt. This represents easily removable liquid investments. As to long term investments
in the U.S. economy, equities have accounted for less than 6% of the total a drop of half of the amount held during the 1990s
stock market boom. China will use these surpluses on its own internal development. They are not long-term investment in the
development of the States! If Japan's example is anything to go by [look at Toyota's history], the U.S. Dollars not used on
China's development will be used in Chinese assembly plants and the like inside the U.S. to promote the import of even more
Chinese goods. So far the year to date shows that the trade deficit with China is 47.4% higher. The same will become true
of the Eurozone and the rest of the world that imports from China.
Of course, the Treasury is still issuing debt with both hands, bringing us to almost $7.9
trillion. The interest on the national debt totaled $321.6 billion in 2004, which works out to an average of 4.1%, and it,
and the total debt, will obviously be higher this year.
What holds it all together is a massive and growing flow of capital from abroad, running to more
than $2 billion every working day, and growing. There is no sense of strain. As a nation we don't consciously borrow or beg.
We aren't even offering attractive interest rates, nor do we have to offer our creditors protection against the risk of a
declining dollar.
Economists at the Federal Reserve believe this deficit is going to continue to grow, with
dire implications. According to Peterson, “If nothing else were to change, borrowing would continue until foreigners accumulate
all the US assets they cared to own, at which point a rise in interest rates(choking off investment) and a decline in the
dollar (choking off imports and stimulating exports) would gradually close the current-account deficit....In the absence of
an increase in the national savings rate, people would just have to get by with less investment in their own economy and debt-service
payments would no longer rise. Instead, Americans would simply make do with less capital, slower growth in GDP, and, of course,
a slower rate of increase in their living standards.”
Adnan Shihab-Eldin, Opec’s acting secretary-general, said that a price of $50 a barrel, based on
US light crude, might be a realistic upper limit for the cartel’s new target price range.
The U.S. government is manipulating all major U.S. financial markets—stocks, treasuries,
currencies. This article shows how it is possible and how it is done, why it is done, who specifically is doing it, when they
do it, and where they get the money to do it.
The key to see is that much of the liabilities behind these positions are inside the US
dollar bloc. It is US-dollar denominated debt mostly owed by US domestic borrowers. What that also means is that when the
time comes to pay off the liabilities, the debtor won't be converting foreign currencies into US dollars. Not unless they
want to borrow in foreign currency.
Essentially the same people who promoted the WTO are now telling us that we have no choice but to
encourage Congress to approve CAFTA — which would be a regional affiliate of that same WTO.
Global financial markets might not be prepared for potential shocks like worse-than-expected inflation
data, particularly if the era of low interest rates is coming to a close, an IMF report said Tuesday.
Also supporting prices were reports that the International Energy Agency is preparing a warning this
month that oil importing countries should implement emergency oil-saving policies if supplies fall by as little as 1m-2m barrels
a day. This was much lower than the 6m b/d agreed in the treaty that founded the energy watchdog back in the 1970s, adding
to the concerns over the insatiable demand for oil. See more on IEA's call for emergency oil plan.
The war for commodities is central to the scramble for political hegemony and economic survival of
the US as the sole world hyperpower and determinant of the world to come according to its own model, rather than face a world
where this cultural, economic and political hegemony is not only challenged but eclipsed by the growing industrial and geopolitical
might of Asia.
If an exchange between two parties
is voluntary, it will not take place unless
both believe they will benefit from it. Most
economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction
of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others . . . the fact that they were the people who created
the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of
wealth as a static quantity . . . to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were
the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
