Dear CIGAs,
A little nostalgia. I was Bert’s chauffeur driving this exact car to Wall Street five days a week.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Not good news for a sitting administration in a by-election year.
I would say rather than break out the champagne last night’s cry was break out the QE.
Colorado’s minimum wage becomes 1st in US to drop
Dec 31, 4:01 PM (ET)
By KRISTEN WYATT
DENVER (AP) – Colorado’s minimum wage will drop slightly in the new year – the first decrease in any state’s minimum wage since the federal minimum was adopted in 1938.
Colorado’s wage is falling 3 cents an hour, from $7.28 to the federal level of $7.25. That’s because Colorado is one of 10 states that tie the state minimum wage to inflation. The goal is to protect low-wage workers from having unchanged paychecks as the cost of living goes up.
But Colorado’s provision also allows wage declines, and the state’s consumer price index fell 0.6 percent last year, so the minimum wage is going down.
The lower consumer price index, attributed to lower fuel prices, would have forced the wage down 4 cents an hour, But no state can go below the federal minimum of $7.25.
Thirteen other states and the District of Columbia will keep a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Alaska will join them Friday when its minimum wage rises 50 cents to $7.75.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Note how the opposition is always referred to as gunmen.
To prevail you need to respect your enemy.
Gunmen attack NATO fuel tankers in Pakistan: police
QUETTA, Pakistan — Gunmen on Friday attacked two tankers travelling though Pakistan’s southwestern province of Baluchistan to supply fuel to NATO troops in neighbouring Afghanistan, police said.
The ambush took place in the Kalay Malik Hashim area, 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of the provincial capital Quetta.
"A group of five gunmen attacked the two tankers, which were parked by a roadside hotel on their way to Afghanistan, and set them on fire early Friday," local police official Mohammad Ansar told AFP.
"All the gunmen later fled the scene while firing gunshots in the air."
The gunmen also shot at the tankers, he said, adding that the driver’s compartment of one truck was destroyed by flames and some oil was lost.
An official in the paramilitary Frontier Corps also confirmed the incident and said there were no reports of deaths.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
First China and now Vietnam react to derivatives, Vietnam to paper gold derivative trading, China to energy and credit default derivatives.
The headline is extremely misgiving. Paper gold derivative trading has been halted. Cash gold trading survives.
It might be a neat idea for the West, but it will not happen.
Vietnam to put an end to gold trading
By Tim Johnston in Bangkok
Published: January 1 2010 13:09 | Last updated: January 1 2010 13:09
Vietnam has ordered all gold trading floors to close by the end of March, putting an end to a business which turns over $1bn a day but which the government feared was spinning out of control.
“Both the owners of the gold-trading floors and traders are doing their transactions on a fragile foundation that lacks legal, economic and technical frameworks and knowledge,” the government said in a statement.
The order also bans using overseas accounts, but does not affect jewellery or retail gold sales.
The government said it was particularly concerned that some investors had been drawn into overleveraging their positions by low interest rates and the ever-increasing price of gold , which has risen from $660/oz when the first trading floor was started in 2007 to almost $1,100/oz today.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
New Years in Pakistan.
Terror attack kills 60 at Pakistan volleyball match
January 1, 2010 1:07 p.m. EST
(CNN) — A suicide car bomb exploded Friday in the middle of a group of men playing volleyball in northwest Pakistan, killing 60 and wounding 60, district police officials told CNN.
The terror attack happened in a residential neighborhood in the Lakki Marwat district of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, police said. Some of the casualties were residents from houses around the volleyball court, district police Chief Mohammed Ayub Khan told CNN.
Khan said eight houses in the neighborhood collapsed, and the blast was so powerful it could be felt from 11 miles (18 kilometers) away.
He said he believes that more than 600 pounds of explosives (300 kilograms) were used.
Volleyball is a popular sport in the area, and more than 200 people were watching the game when the bomb went off, the police chief said.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
The Chairman met with more than 20 Senators in private meetings as part of his nomination confirmation process.
This silly MOPE is certainly part of that.
Fed Discusses Limited Bond Sales to Withdraw Stimulus (Update1)
By Craig Torres
Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) — Federal Reserve officials are considering a proposal to schedule limited sales of bonds from the central bank’s $2.2 trillion balance sheet as part of a range of tools for withdrawing record monetary stimulus.
The Federal Open Market Committee discussed asset sales at its November meeting, with some members in favor and others warning that it would cause “sharp increases” in longer-term interest rates, according to minutes of the meeting released Nov. 24. A middle route now being studied would allow small amounts of bonds to be unloaded at announced times.
“The attitude toward asset sales is changing in terms of more in favor and more open minded, and doing it very gradually,” said former Fed Governor Laurence Meyer, vice chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC in Washington. Devising a plan for pulling back stimulus “is under way intensively on the Federal Open Market Committee,” he said.
Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is trying to wind down emergency stimulus programs that helped avert a second Great Depression, while alleviating concerns that inflation will accelerate as the economy picks up. U.S. Treasury securities posted their worst performance since the 1970s after the Obama administration borrowed record sums to help drive the rebound from recession. Yields on 10-year notes are close to their highest level since June, rising to 3.84 percent at 4:45 p.m. in New York.
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
The December long pep rally by the MOPErs on F-TV for the economic boom of 2010 will have to be a pep rally for "QE to infinity."
Fanny and Freddie seem to be the calendar stars for that process.
Fannie, Freddie proving too big to shrink
Taxpayer tab for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac likely to rise after Treasury’s Christmas Eve pledge
By Alan Zibel, AP Real Estate Writer , On Wednesday December 30, 2009, 8:08 pm EST
WASHINGTON (AP) — The government’s Christmas Eve pledge of unlimited financial aid to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is aimed at making sure the housing market doesn’t take another turn for the worse and cause the economic recovery to unravel.
This insurance policy taken out by the Treasury Department will help keep mortgage rates low, and may wind up being a gift of sorts to struggling homeowners and banks. But there’s a catch: the housing crisis is now likely to cost taxpayers much more.
The Obama administration’s latest lifeline to Fannie and Freddie will cover unlimited losses through 2012, lifting an earlier cap of $400 billion. It also eases restrictions on the size of the companies’ investment portfolios. That’s a reversal of the Bush administration’s September 2008 plan to shrink the size of the companies’ holdings of mortgage-backed securities.
The action, which didn’t need the approval of Congress, could position Fannie and Freddie to get more aggressive in dealing with the housing crisis, perhaps taking troubled mortgage investments off banks’ books.
"They’ve cleared the decks to use Fannie and Freddie as a vessel for whatever they want," says Edward Pinto, a housing consultant who served as Fannie’s chief credit officer in the late 1980s.
