Links

Long-time subscribers may recall my occasional paeans to Howard Hill -- the Mozart of fixed-income instruments, as far as I'm concerned. I used to quote Howard regularly on the site -- until he took a 9-to-5 job with an investment firm that did not allow him to be quoted, at least not publically.  As a result of massive layoffs in his sector, however, Howard has returned to café society and the salons of cyberworld as a blogger.  I would encourage you to visit his site, Mind on Money, by clicking here, and to experience a dialogue that promises to be as high-minded and enlightening as any you will find on the Web.  He really knows his stuff.

Evidence of a conspiracy to suppress the price of gold sometime surfaces in ways that should give pause even to die-hard skeptics. Click here for Antal Fekete's very interesting ruminations on "bad" gold supposedly on offer by the Bank of England, paper-shuffling to obscure the crime, and, get this now, the prospect of a global short-squeeze on physical.

Here is Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, flatly contradicting the Goldstone Report that accuses Israel of war crimes in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.  "The Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare," Kemp testified before the U.N. Human Rights Council.  "Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population."  Click here  to access a short excerpt from Col. Kemp's presentation.

The New Yorker magazine recently delved into the question of whether Martin Armstrong is a con man, a crook or a genius. Click here to access the article.

Sightings of  "green shoots" of recovery were as common during the Great Depression as they are now -- and just as pathetic.  Benjamin Roth recorded the economic roller coaster ride for posterity in a diary that was the subject of a New York Times article published over the weekend. "How it was all over by 1930 — but it wasn’t. How everyone was giddy from all the government stimulus in 1935 and 1936 — and the sudden and dramatic reversal in 1937 and 1938. It resonates, especially at a time when all the mainstream economists focus so intently over the latest tick in the regional manufacturing indices or jobless claims or inventory-sales ratios. You have to go beyond the confines of Wall Street to see what is really going on beyond the trees — this was not a recession brought on by excessive inventories, or by inflationary pressures for that matter."  Click here  to access this must-read article.

A few days ago, I published a link to a powerful essay by Charles Krauthammer:  "The New Liberalism and the End of American Ascendancy".  To give the link a little more hang time, I am publishing it once again in today's edition. Click here  to access the essay.

From Rich Cash, a description of the health care bill that sums it up nicely: "A health care system plan written by a committee whose head says he doesn’t understand any of it, to be passed by a Congress that hasn’t and won’t read it, but exempts themselves from it, signed by a president who smokes and also hasn’t read it, with funding administered by a Treasury Secretary who didn’t pay his taxes, overseen by an obese Surgeon General, and massively financed by a country that’s nearly broke. Great plan! What could possibly go wrong?"

Subscriber Jonathan Auerbach, who travels the Third World in search of ground-floor investment opportunities, has sent us an interesting dispatch concerning, of all places, Africa.  Here is his man-bites-dog story: I returned this weekend from over two weeks in Africa and by the way I have been going to Africa regularly for 15 years and on any day (just like your hometown USA) you will run into fund managers, poets, bankers, visionaries, politicians, street people, traders, educators, and some just plain rogues. But here in Africa, categorically, they all have an energetic commitment, and most importantly, skin in the game, and they are compelled to understand the abundant enigma of this continent...if you have stayed with me so far, do not go, the best is yet to come. I've returned with a new African vision and no I am not going to repeat my mantra of the burgeoning growth of empowered people and private institutions. What I have asked myself after this visit and what I want you to consider is why since South Africa reinvented itself under Mandela in the early 90s have we continued to view SA as something different from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Was it their lack of a recent kleptocratic colonial legacy? Was it their continuing exchange controls that mitigated active investment in their neighbors? Was it their 'European' connectivity with a highly automated electronic securities markets and dual listings in NY or London? Or was it just their perceived wealth at the top of the pyramid? Forget all of this because our firm going forward is going to analyze and deal with SA as an integrated market in Africa. Why? Because on this trip I met a number of CEOs from major SA companies and the facts and their plans militate for rampant

South China Mall outside of Guangzhou (where??) is by far the world's largest, dwarfing the Mall of America in every way. There are carnival rides, mini-parks, canals and lakes amid classic Western-style buildings with space for hundreds of shops. Alex Hu, a local Guangzhou boy who made it big in international business, wanted South China Mall to be a hometown monument to his success — even though Guangzhou has no major airports or highways nearby.  And four years after its construction, the mall sits virtually empty of both shops and shoppers. But the Chinese have imported yet another concept familiar to Americans — South China Mall is considered too big to fail. So, employees line up for flag-raising ceremonies and pep talks about “brand building” before going off to maintain the deserted concourses meticulously.  Click here to watch PBS's fascinating, 13-minute documentary.