Thought For The Evening
Gold continues to act out of sync with its normal motivators.
Reports indicate that South Korea shot first. International tensions have not had a major impact on gold in the past year, yet gold held the majority of its upside today.
This is the third trading day that gold has managed the shake off normal market detractions. I find that interesting.
Thought For The Morning
Merkle of Germany has been quiet on this Irish bailout until today. That seemed strange.
Today she is jumping up and down again. That was good for a few hundred point on the downside of the euro.
Could this be a currency war and covering by the usual suspects?
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
The ability of banks to determine the value of an item without any reference to what that item could be sold for is simply wrong.
Fight Over Fair Value in Global Finance Making Volcker Rue FASB Dissonance
By Yalman Onaran – Nov 21, 2010 7:00 PM ET
A dispute between U.S. and international accounting groups about how to value financial instruments is threatening to derail efforts to converge global standards, affecting how trillions of dollars of assets are marked on bank balance sheets.
The debate pits the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board, which wants to expand the use of fair-value accounting to all financial assets, including loans and deposits, against the London-based International Accounting Standards Board, which opposes such a wide usage. The outcome also will determine how much capital banks have to hold to meet new rules.
FASB’s proposal, announced in May, could cause 26 of the largest U.S. banks to write down the value of about $4 trillion of loans on their books by as much as $138 billion, estimated Jason Goldberg, an analyst at Barclays Plc. Lenders, regulators and some investors have taken IASB’s side, leaving the U.S. standard-setter isolated in its battle.
“Treatment of financial instruments has been the sticking point, and there’s a lot of political pressure on all sides on that,” said Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve who first introduced the idea of accounting convergence as head of the group that oversees IASB. “When you have global corporations operating around the world, and analysts looking at them from around the world, you want one accounting standard.”
Jim Sinclair’s Commentary
Ooops!
Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor
By DEXTER FILKINS and CARLOTTA GALL
Published: November 22, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.
But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor, and high-level discussions conducted with the assistance of NATO appear to have achieved little.
“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
American officials confirmed Monday that they had given up hope that the Afghan was Mr. Mansour, or even a member of the Taliban leadership.
NATO and Afghan officials said they held three meetings with the man, who traveled from in Pakistan, where Taliban leaders have taken refuge.
