Most of our readers are not likely to know that last week featured a five day military encounter between the Indian Army and the commandos of the Pakistani quasi-military organization Lashkar-e-Toiba. This is the same organization that attacked Mumbai in November 2008 killing several hundred innocent civilians. The encounter took place in the thick forests…
On Thursday, March 26, 2009, Mr. Joe Terranova made an “expert” appearance on CNBC’s Fast Money Show to discuss “Trading China’s Stimulus”. He quickly launched into his favorite topic, US Treasuries. He actually suggested on American National TV that the US Federal Reserve was following the lead of Chinese Government in buying the same maturities of US Treasuries…
The past few weeks have been full of intense media coverage of China, its comments about the US Dollar, its holdings of US Treasuries, its domestic stimulus and the recent naval incident between the Chinese & US Navies in the South China Sea.We shall try to cover these issues in this article. A detailed article…
AIG CEO Edward Liddy received a brutal lashing by a Congressional Committee last week. It was sheer torture to watch. Every Congressman on that committee decided to express his or her utter outrage for the camera and create sound bites to be used for the reelection campaign. Watching this spectacle unfold, we began imagining a…
It was such a pleasant surprise to see the great Jon Stewart invite Nandan Nilekani on his show. After all, who expected Jon Stewart to have heard of Nandan or his company InfoSys. But then the mystery was cleared up.Jon asked Nandan about his friendship with Tom Friedman of the New York Times. Ah! No wonder Jon…
Our first article about Ben Bernanke on this blog was titled “Jim Cramer on Ben Bernanke – Fair in August 2007 and Unfair in August 2008” ( https://cinemarasik.com/2008/08/01/jim-cramer-on-ben-bernanke—fair-in-august-2007-and-unfair-in-august-2008.aspx%C2%A0 ).In that article, we coined the term “Mo-Force” to describe the (then) enormous, gigantic pool of capital in the hands of short-term, performance-oriented investors or commonly called the…
The Taylor Rule, proposed first by economist John Taylor in 1993, is a monetary policy formula (or rule) that stipulates how much the Federal Reserve Bank should change its federal funds rate in response to GDP (gross domestic product) and inflation. For example, if inflation were to rise by 1%, the proper Taylor Rule response would be…
We thought of several titles for this article including the overused “Bernanke For President”. Then we heard Jim Cramer use the phrase “In Bernanke I Trust” in his comments on Wednesday afternoon. We felt this was the perfect title and with all credit to Cramer, we hope to borrow it for our article.Our first article…
The verdict is unanimous. In his publicized face off against Jim Cramer, Jon Stewart won by a knockout. We were interested in this brawl because we expected a serious debate between two passionate people with opposing viewpoints. That debate never took place. That was a loss for the American people. So, in this article, we…
Thursday March 12, 2009, was the day of Brawl Street, the day of the much ballyhooed face to face brawl between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer. Like the combined audience (they hoped) of Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer, we were ready for a full throated debate.It never happened. Roberto Duran lasted a few rounds but…