For example, Charles I of England. There is no doubt that cash has been good to hold over the past year, US dollars and yen especially as everyone squared their accounts.
But Morgan Stanley doesn’t believe in deflation, and neither do I.
Although headline prices likely will decline sharply in coming months, underlying inflation over [...]
The Royal Society, Britain’s oldest scientific academy, has published a series of papers in its Philosophical Transactions outlining some of the options for intervening directly in the planet’s climate. Some of these are pretty scary.
Richard Branson, a British businessman, is already offering a prize of $25m for a workable way of removing a [...]
Semi sales up 7.6% year on year (via Briefing.com). Lots of market talk about LCD sales softening as well.
Semiconductor chip sales during July increased 7.6% from last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. In turn, total July sales were $22.2 billion. Sales were also up from the prior month when they totaled [...]
Thinks aren’t all that rosy outside in the OECD either.
Mortgage approvals for home purchases in June fell to 36,000, according to the Bank of England—a third of what they were a year ago… One reason is that house prices are down about 9% from their peak in October 2007…
Prices dropped in [...]
A range of tech stories from Friday’s Economist.
[Generic drugs] enjoyed $72 billion in sales last year, and is growing faster than the conventional drugs business… $130 billion of prescription pills will go off patent by 2012… Generics make up nearly two-thirds of the American drugs market by volume, but only 13% by value… Competition is… [...]
I like this cartoon for perspective on the past year, though I would perhaps swap a few of the roles around. To me, it’s the regulators that lacked the courage to prick this bubble, and the investors that lacked a brain. I don’t expect the lenders to have a heart.
The Wizard of Oz [...]
The housing-rescue legislation passed by the House and Senate offers emergency funding to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac along with establishing a $300 billion fund to help struggling homeowners… and now bond investors are again snapping the portfolio up because of the combination of high yields with a government guarantee,
“We like it,” said [...]
The Economist finally gets onto the Chinese hot money story that Yves Salmon and Brad Setser have been worrying away at (Brad’s last post was titled “Why not more articles on China’s reserve growth?”).
Logan Wright, a Beijing-based analyst, reckons that total foreign-exchange assets rose by an astonishing $393 billion in the [...]
The Economist is forecasting a resurgence in telecom tie-ups:
France Telecom [is in discussions] with TeliaSonera about a long-anticipated takeover offer for the Swedish firm, in a deal worth some SKr252 billion ($42 billion)… which, if successful, would create Europe’s biggest mobile-phone company by revenue, and boast 237m customers in 30 countries. Verizon Wireless agreed to [...]
The Economist points out that, corrected for population growth, Japan’s economy has outstripped the US over the past 5 years.
The popular perception is that America’s vibrant economy was sprinting ahead (albeit fuelled by credit and housing bubbles that have now painfully burst), whereas Japan crawled along at a snail’s pace. And it is true that [...]