Dear rss free blog,
Back in the USA, I want to
apologize to those who sent me an e-mail via the
www.global-investing.com website. This mail did not get forwarded by
my Time-Warner roadrunner e-mail service so your messages
could not be dealt on my travels. Just about the only e-mail that
works these days is spam. The real stuff becomes the target of
anti-spam systems but the fake gets through. It is as annoying as
airport security checks and works less well.
Israel did what Citigroup
forecast. Its CB raised interest rates by another quarter point
to 1% and this hints at continued incremental rate increases by other
countries in the same happy situation as the Jewish State. These
include Australia and Norway. The impact of higher interest rates is
negative for exporters but positive for yield seekers.
There is one piece of good
news. We have been invited to a Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow after
all. That means our efforts to deal with leftovers in London was a
harbinger of more turkey to come. In the end, most of the big bird
meat was put in the freezer for future meals at Mudchute Manor, our London
pied-a-terre. We will be going back in March for a family
wedding and the groom is a vegan, so I will be anxious for
carnivorous meals. And despite the advise Ian Wright, the retired
editor of The Guardian, I did not try to freeze the huge carcass to
get broth from it; I had better fish to freeze.
Tonight we dine on steak.
Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it.
Turkey doesn’t come from Turkey. It is also not from India (as the French name dinde might lead you to believe.) It is an American creature, in some Latin American Spanish and all Portuguese called peru. That may be the source.
Some corrections over
articles from my travels. The hedge fund whiz
who is creating a gold fund is named John Paulson, not Paulsen.
Thanks to reader and contributor Frida Ghitis for spotting the error.
Second, according to RL, my son the financial analyst, men are now as likely as
women to be having botox shots. I took a certain amount of flak in
London from my competitor David Fuller of www.fullermoney.com for my
note lambasting the Senate idea of a 5% tax on cosmetic procedures to
finance the health care reform bill. David is forgiven since he was
masterly in carving our London turkey. And now it turns out that I
was wrong.
Finally Canadian reader MF
says that Britain began overspending in 2001 to help win Labour
another victory. He says my strictures against Bush II deficit spending in the fat years was misplaced.
However figures from the OECD and The Economist seem to show that for
all their sins, the British did not run into the red as recklessly as
our own former Administration did when you compare government
deficits to GNP.
More from Frida (who was born
in Colombia) and me for paid subscribers follows mostly about Latin
America. But first notes from me, the first about two stocks from the land of dinde:
The trouble with France is
that it is schizophrenic. Par ici, you have the all-powerful
Colbertian state; par là you have Goldman Sachs.
And now a note from the land of tarnegal shel hodi (the fowl of Thanksgiving): The stock I really want to
buy in Israel is A Better Place, a developer of car engine
battery service stations for electric cars, now being tested in
France, Denmark and Israeli itself. But it is privately held. The
biggest shareholder is the conglomerate Israel Corp. with no ADRs
which is sinking because it controls the Zim shipping line.
