Dear rss free blog,
Here is a
note which I am posting with a question: can this go on?
Senior
NASDAQ OMX officials today announced that a record 33 Chinese companies, the
most of any U.S.
exchange, listed on Nasdaq in 2009. A total of 124 Chinese companies now
list on Q, including 102 from mainland China,
and 22 from Taiwan, Hong
Kong, and Macau.
Meanwile the decade of the teens has begun with
snow, ice, and cold winds. Today the following message was received from M O’C:
”We have not had a winter
like this here in Ireland
in living or maybe even in dead memory. Completely unable to cope with it. It
is so bad that even the drivers here in Kerry, who normally drive casually and
at speed on all sides of the road simultaneously, are driving with care and a
lack of speed. The wind-chill here in the extreme south-west is in such a hurry
that it is not stopping off in Greenland or Iceland for a glass of Glühwein but
comes now directly from the North Pole. When I walked up to the local shop for
the papers, I had difficulty in detaching the icicle from the tip of my
nose…….’’
And he is not alone. We have
extreme cold here in New York City
and there are blizzards upstate. Of course in Quebec City, webmaster Roger has to shovel
snow until at least April almost every year, but the amounts are high and there
is a lot of ice this year.
Moreover now my
brother-in-law is shoveling away the stuff from his doorstep in South London. Stockwell is not very far south, but they
have not had a snow dump like this for a couple of decades. Frida Ghitis writes
about freezing cold in Atlanta
which she is about to escape from again. The orange trees are frozen in Florida. My children are
shoveling unusually large quantities of white stuff in Boston
and Cleveland.
There is 20-yr record snow in
England
and the airports are shut or slowed; the railroads are impassible and the roads
dangerous because they have run out of grit. There is 40-year record snow in Beijing, where Tienanmin Square is
blanketed with the stuff. Also record snow is Seoul. Most of northern Europe
is shivering.
In fact the only major
developed country where there is no cold snap at this moment is Australia. (I
have no idea about New Zealand, where we have just signed up our
second subscriber, but I suspect it is summery there too.)
The price of oil is rising
because of demand for winter fuel. So too are the prices of other commodities
whose extraction is being hindered by extreme cold, like copper and other
metals.
These price increases will
have the impact of a tax hike on the economies of the world (including the
antipodes, because oil and metals are priced globally.) Taxes hurt growth.
This cold snap and the
resulting price rises will hamper and delay the global economic recovery.
Stimulus will have to be maintained for longer to keep hiring, spending, and
investing on the bubble, and to help the financial sector recover its bearings.
DP World
Ltd., the port operator whose parent Dubai World is in bankruptcy,
told Bloomberg it will seek a London Stock
Exchange listing to boost its valuation in H2. It is currently listed only in Dubai. We tried
unsuccessfully to buy shares in the port operator right after the Dubai
default; one of our subscribers managed to do the trade in Switzerland but I
could not. It is trading at a significant discount from other port operators
Bloomberg
learned from Rami Sidani, who manages $250 mn as head of Middle East and North
Africa at Schroder Investment Management Ltd. in Dubai that ”this move means
more visibility for the company, as well as greater credibility as an
international player.’’
DP World is the 4th-largest
port operator, behind Hong Kong’s Hutchison Port Holdings,
Singapore’s PSA International Pte., and Denmark’s AP Moeller-Maersk.
Moody’s rates it below investment grade, unlike its rivals, because of Dubai problems.
Happy Epiphany. If it wasn’t
so darn cold I would head for the French bakery and buy a galette des
rois, a special almond paste pie, and cut it in slices looking for
the bean. The finder gets to wear a paper crown. A crown (according to Frederick the Great) is a
special hat that lets the snow fall on your head.
More for paid subscribers
follows, starting with a dispatch written by Frida while wearing gloves: and one piece of warming news.
P.S. please excuse the weird quotation marks. I am now using Microsoft word again and the standard quotation marks lead to font changes. I have
asked Microsoft for a work-round for Office 2003; they offered me one for
Word 2000 or a chance to buy Word 2010 in beta.
