Limits Put on Some Oil Contracts On ICE Amid Outcry Over Prices
By IAN TALLEY
June 17, 2008
WASHINGTON — The U.S. commodity futures regulator Tuesday said ICE
Futures Europe has agreed to make permanent position and
accountability limits for some of its U.S.-traded crude contracts,
subjecting itself to the same regulatory oversight as its New York
based counterpart.
Following intense scrutiny and [...]
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country; nominal interest rate; date; official CPI; last update; real interest rate
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China 7.47% 06/13/08 7.70% 05/31/08 -0.23%
Hong Kong [...]
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on today’s seismic Treasury selloff:
“The point is that the world was long Treasury, and we can see how they’ve been suckered.”
In other news, more insanity from the federales, who think they can permanently reduce commodities prices by shoving out leveraged players.
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Didn’t get this memo. No sir.
Fetch your tin helmets once again. The European Central Bank is opting for a monetary purge. So too is the US Federal Reserve, now ruled from Dallas.
Über-hawks and Cromwellians have gained the upper hand at the great fortress banks. Whether or not they admit it, both are embarked on policies [...]
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Thomas Palley, Open Society Institute pontificator emeritus cum DC-cocktail laude, mocks himself best when he’s most honest. As do most political people.
Defending the Bernanke Fed
Filed under: U.S. Policy, Uncategorized — Administrator @ 6:37 am
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has recently been on the receiving end of significant criticism for recent monetary policy. One critique [...]
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There were about five pieces of news on Friday that delivered such a massive upside kick to oil.
1) Chinese oil consumption numbers came in much higher than expected.
Wall Street is still being blindsided by the impact of the Sichuan earthquake, and apparently most of it is ignorant that ~30 percent of Chinese oil/ natgas/ heating [...]
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Setser on the PBOC:
What cann’t go on still hasn’t slowed, let alone stopped (Chinese reserve growth)
Posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 by bsetser
… Back in 2004, it was considered rather stunning when China added close to $100 billion to its reserves ($95 billion) in a single quarter, bring its total reserves up to around [...]
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“With Bold Steps, Fed Chief Quiets Some Criticism”:
[...]
“It has been a really head-spinning range of unprecedented and bold actions,” said Charles W. Calomiris, professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, referring to the Fed’s lending activities. “That is exactly as it should be. But I’m not saying that it’s without some cost and [...]
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via
Using figures compile [sic] by independent research house GFMS Ltd., the council says the consumption of 31.5 tons in the first quarter shows a steep increase of 110% year-on-year and accounting for 43% of the world’s net retail investment demand of 72.2 tons in the period.
Vietnam’s arrival into pole position in the retail investment sector [...]
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Soros must be fuming that he dumped commodities and called a bottom in equities when he did.
Soros’s public pronouncements are consistently somewhat at odds with how he actually invests. (He couldn’t have made money any other way; the track record of his public pronouncements is awful.) This instance, presumably, is no exception.
Not that he has [...]
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… underwritten by PIMCO’s Bill Gross.
Just in time for the huge TIPS burp a couple of nights ago, when massive buying pushed the 5-year TIPS yield down to -.77.
I’ve been a huge fan of the SS hypothesis for a long time, so it’s good to see the world’s biggest fixed income guru practically copy-paste from [...]
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Posted in china, inflation on May 24, 2008 | No Comments »
Apparently luck had it that every single Chinese ADR, and more than a few others, trooped to the United States to make their pitches to US investors. I got to listen to more than a few of them over the past four days (one reason why the post count has run low).
American institutional investors are [...]
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Posted in dawn to decadence, doomsterism, economy, federal reserve, inflation, monetary policy, politics, shitigroup, volatility, wall street on May 18, 2008 | No Comments »
The credit crisis has separated true libertarians from phony libertarians, and separated true liberals from phony liberals.
The phony liberals have inadvertently mocked themselves throughout the entire credit crisis, manning the barricades to defend the greatest act of socialism for the rich in US history. Ditto for supposed “libertarians,” eg Robert Rubin, Bruce Kovner, and the [...]
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The entire economy of Iceland has come under massive speculative assault in the past several months, as the most ludicrous example of an overextended, overleveraged, underfunded European economy.
As of December 2006, its rolling annual trade deficit was 26 percent of GDP. That has come down to “only” 15 percent as of January 2008.
However, Iceland’s currency [...]
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Bernanke wingman Frederic Mishkin today, parroting Barney Frank:
I would like to emphasize the importance of regulatory policy. Monetary policy–that is, the setting of overnight interest rates–is already challenged by the task of managing both price stability and maximum sustainable employment. As a result, it falls to regulatory policies and supervisory practices to help strengthen the [...]
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IFR:
[13:57 US GOVTS: Fallout From Credit Crisis Seen in TIC Data]
Boston, May 15. Though foreigners continued to buy treasuries (a record $55 bln) and agency ($18 bln) paper hand over fist in the latest March TIC data the net flow for the month was actually a negative $48 bln. While far from an expert in [...]
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Removing gasoline sales, which have been strongly influenced by the sharp rise in
prices in recent months, allows a better measure of real or inflation-adjusted sales
to be examined. Alternative measures of the so-called ‘control group,’ included in
real consumer spending as measured by the BEA, rose about 0.5% in April,
following a revised increase of about 0.3% [...]
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12:03 US Senate OKs amendment to halt strategic petroleum reserve fill;
amendment passes by veto-proof margin - DJ [Dow Jones]
This is part of larger choreography. … If the Democrats are attempting to freelance, the CIA could easily bust an attempted Senate veto override given how ‘dirty’ so many senators are.
The end result of this will be [...]
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Regular finance-focused readers have probably noticed that I’ve neglected economic commentary recently. That’s because 1) there hasn’t been much net marginal information recently to clarify what I see right now (monstrous reflation in the West, looming monstrous deflation in the East, looming war in the Mid-East, commodities as The Big Thing through late July). 2) [...]
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