Month: March 2012

India’s Finance Minister unveils his budget to parliament under pressure to slash the nation’s yawning fiscal deficit.

This is what’s in the news for Friday March 16, 2012. The Wall Street Journal reports U.S. and EU regulators are investigating Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) for bypassing privacy settings of millions of users of Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) Safari browser, sources say. The Wall Street Journal also reports the Commodity Futures Trading Commission plans to expand day-to-day monitoring of the commodities and futures markets, targeting high-speed trading firms. Reuters reports The explosive Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) resignation letter has increased pressure on U.S. regulators to quickly put in place a tough version of the Volcker rule. Bloomberg reports highly indebted Italy paid $3.4B to Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) in January to unwind derivative contracts from the 1990s that backfired, sources say. Finally, Bloomberg also reports a Supreme Court ruling on whether the U.S. health care law is constitutional won’t stop market forces transforming how Americans get their medical care, says Cigna (CI) CEO David Cordani,

The U.S. saw jobless claims drop last week to a level matching a four year low set in March 2008, Bloomberg reports. Economists and experts believe that the decline indicates the U.S. economy is on an ever firmer recovery.The New York Federal Reserve gave indication that the industries in the area had improved economically and were hiring more while firing less. Average workweeks in the state doubled as well. Similar performance could be seen elsewhere in the Northeast.New applications were projected to be down to 350,000, a drop from 365,000 the previous week. The jobless decrease is accompanied by a three week trend of job growth of over 200,000 jobs a week.

Watsco (NYSE:WSO)(NYSE:UTX) has agreed to acquire Carrier’s HVAC distribution network in Canada.Carrier is a unit of UTC Climate, Controls & Security. The business will operate as a JV under the name Carrier Enterprise Canada with Watsco owning 60% and UTS Climate, Controls & Security 40%.The Canadian distribution network operates 35 locations and had revenues of approximately $330 million in 2011 serving 5,000 customers in all of the provinces and territories of Canada.

USDJPY stays above a rising trend line on 4-hour chart, and remains in uptrend from 80.58, the fall from 84.17 is treated as consolidation of the uptrend. Support is at the trend line, as long as the trend line support holds, uptrend could be expected to resume, and another rise towards 85.00 is still possible, only a clear break below the trend line could indicate that lengthier consolidation of the uptrend is underway, then sideways movement in a range between 82.50 and 84.17 could be seen.

Daily Forex Forecast

AAON (NASDAQ:AAON) reported Q4 EPS of $0.09, may not be comparable to consensus estimates of $0.21.Revenues in the quarter fell 3.6% year-over-year to $63.4 million, missing estimates by $12 million.

By MoneyMorning.com.au

Billionaire US investor Jim Rogers is bullish on China.

We can safely say regular Money Morning editor Kris Sayce is not. That might be putting it the wrong away. It would be like saying Man vs. Wild star Bear Grylls tries an adventurous meal every now and again: it understates the case.

Kris was making his speech for ‘After America’. We were half way through the first full day of the conference. There was no slowing down. Kris said China is an ‘entrepreneurial desert’ whose economy is based on ‘the lowest common denominator: cheap labour’.

The top brass in government spend money to build pointless stadiums and buildings. The idea that the West was ‘exporting’ capitalism to China was a joke. Most of the Western world is as socialist as the comrades in Beijing, anyway.

But it doesn’t mean you can’t make a buck investing. There is always an opportunity when people are free to create wealth. Natural gas is a key sector to investigate in 2012. It’s not without risk. But speculation could have a place in your investment strategy.

Balancing and allocating your portfolio, he added, is not as complex as the marketing industry – sorry, the finance industry – would have you believe. You can do most of it yourself (and save the fees) through a handful of carefully selected investments.

After lunch, Murray Dawes broke down charts, such as BHP and oil, in detail. Every investor could benefit from listening to the Slipstream Trader. Actually, we should say from watching. Murray is a trader. Charts are important. If you’re considering ordering the audio or DVD of the After America conference and you’re interested in Murray’s work, we humbly suggest you choose the visual option.

Murray didn’t let us forget price action is always a map of human psychology. And we must always remember that our own mind and emotions can be our biggest enemy. We’re all a mixture of biases and assumptions. Not to mention ego – the biggest trap of all. We need to manage risk, but get exposure to large upside potentials. It’s a balancing act.

Nick Hubble knows about those. At one point he had four juggling balls in the air. He also got the delegates on their feet. He had a powerful strategy for buying shares at a discount with a view for income in a world of low-growth capital gains.

Six of the presenters were on a panel. People were free to ask what they liked. The discussion came to how the cost of credit had been held artificially low and the resulting crisis. The conclusion: If you give everyone free drinks people are going to get drunk.

Dylan Grice suggested popular anger directed against banks should be directed to those who (mis)priced credit in the first place – central bankers. And the system that put them in that position of power. Sadly, the guys who took us here are still in control.

But it doesn’t mean we are powerless. We can control our own investment strategy if we are mindful of the wider context. The first rule of a bear market is not to lose money.

As we got ready to wrap up, there was a surprise announcement. Professor Steve Keen had decided to do an unscheduled speech to open the following day …things are going to get even more interesting! Stay tuned.

Callum Newman
Roving Reporter, ‘After America’

‘After America’: Threats and Opportunities

As last year’s Arab spring has slowly roiled eastwards from Tunisia to the eastern Mediterranean, the two most concerned governments are the U.S. and Israel, that are watching their carefully constructed defense alignments crumble to the populist forces unleashed.

After decades of repression, the Arab “street” is finding its democratic voice, which is rejecting the cozy decades-long security and energy arrangements carefully stitched together by Washington to ensure Israeli security. In the “brave new world” emerging, it is increasingly obvious that the post-Arab Spring governments, inhaling Western democratic ideals relentlessly promoted as the way forward, have a radically different agenda than those proposed by Washington and Tel Aviv.

Viewing social upheavals decades ago, in 1973 Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of State commented prior to the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chilean socialist President Salvadore Allende “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”

Now the Arab spring seems to be embracing two policies anathema to Washington – a rejection by Egypt of its ties to Israel, carefully fostered by assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and his successor, Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s President until 13 months ago, when the Arab spring populist uprising unseated him and his administration’s cozy energy arrangements with Israel, which provided Tel Aviv with 2/5 of its natural gas import requirement needs.

In a development largely overlooked in the Western press, in an evening session on 12 March the Egyptian People’s Assembly demanded the deportation of the Israeli ambassador Yaakov Amitai, and the withdrawal of the Egyptian ambassador from Tel Aviv.

And oh, the nullification of the country’s natural gas sales to Israel.

The People’s Assembly vote was unanimous.

Why?

As a protest against Israel’s recent campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which the Egyptian Assembly considers a flagrant violation of human rights.

Newly founded Egyptian democratic handwriting on the wall? Assembly speaker Saad al-Katatny asked a special parliamentary committee to follow up the implementation of the demands with the government, releasing a People’s Assembly statement commenting, “Egypt after the revolution will never be a friend of the Zionist entity, the first enemy of Egypt and the Arab nation,” demanding that the Egyptian government review all its relations and agreements with that “enemy” along with calling for stopping Egyptian natural gas exports to Israel.

So, how serious a threat?

Egypt is the Arab’s world’s largest country and has played a central role in Middle Eastern politics for decades. In 1979 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel under terms of the Camp David agreement. Sadat’s initiative led to Egypt being expelled from the Arab League for a decade, and in 1981 Sadat was assassinated by Islamic extremists, to be succeeded by Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt until February of last year, when the “Arab Spring” swept him from power.

The tenuous peace established by the Camp David accords, liberally lubricated by massive U.S. aid, endured until February 2011, and quite aside from marginalizing the Arab world’s military superpower, further paid off Israel with the opening in 2005 of Egypt’s $500 million East Mediterranean Gas Company Ltd. (EMG) pipeline, which supplied 40 percent of Israel’s natural gas through an underwater pipeline from the Egyptian city of El Arish on the northern Mediterranean coast to the Israeli port of Ashkelon.

The East Mediterranean Gas Company Ltd. was established in 2000 and is jointly owned by Egyptian General Petroleum Corp., which owns 68.4 percent of the venture, and its 170 million cubic feet of gas per day of exports and met nearly half of Israel’s natural gas needs until the Arab Spring swept Cairo a year ago.

The latest Egyptian National Assembly vote puts that at risk.

But it’s not as if Tel Aviv has been unaware of the consequences of Cairo’s “Spring,” as the East Mediterranean Gas Company Ltd. Pipeline has been bombed 13 times since Mubarak’s overthrow, most recently on 5 March, and remains closed at present.

The National Assembly’s motion at present remains largely symbolic because only Egypt’s current government, the Military Council, can sign off on such decisions.

That said, the vote is a startling manifestation of the feelings of the Egyptian people, and, as such, can hardly be ignored in the Middle East’s rising embrace of democratic values, as assiduously promoted by Washington. The only problem for the U.S. is that Egyptian voters had a somewhat different perception of what being able to choose in their foreign relations entailed, and after decades of Mubarak’s rule, have a somewhat different view of the future from their Washington ‘advisers.”

Egyptian voters have resoundingly rejected Washington’s exhortations and accordingly, Israeli consumers had better be ready to turn down both their thermostats and air conditioning, as the winds of change of the Arab Spring continue to roil the Middle East and bring new political realities into being, undoubtedly not all to Washington and Tel Aviv’s liking.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Egyptian-Israeli-Natural-Gas-Contract-Casualty-of-Arab-spring.html

By. John C.K. Daly of Oilprice.com

Morgan Stanley raised its target price on shares of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) to $960 and added its shares to the Best Ideas list.The bank said its valuation remains low, with several factors pointing to continued growth: enterprise adoption of the iPad, potential share gains from its launch of LTE-capable iPhone and untapped foreign markets like Brazil and China.

Some promising news for the labor market and an increase in regional manufacturing activity helped stocks edge higher, on this light trading day. The number of Americans signing up for unemployment benefits fell by 14,000 last week to 351,000, according to the Labor Department.