Friday Lite

It's a holiday weekend. Everyone's going to be filling up their tanks with three-and-a-half dollar petrol trying to remember the good old days when gas prices were falling and home prices were rising. In this neck of the woods the price of regular gas has been sticking stubbornly in the $3.30 to $3.45 range - a 15 gallon load of mid-grade yesterday totaled over $50.

Oh well - gotta drive.

Not Very Lite At All

This story about possible human-to-human transmission of bird flu is yet another reminder of the plethora of bad things that may interrupt the otherwise idyllic lives of American homeowners and SUV drivers in the first decade of the new century.

All seven people infected with bird flu in a cluster of Indonesian cases can be linked to other patients, according to disease trackers investigating possible human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 virus.

A team of international experts has been unable to find animals that might have infected the people, the World Health Organization said in a statement today. In one case, a 10-year- old boy who caught the virus from his aunt may have passed it to his father, the first time officials have seen evidence of a three-person chain of infection, an agency spokeswoman said. Six of the seven people have died.

Are they still predicting that migratory birds will bring bird flu to the U.S. this year - coming down from Alaska into the Pacific Northwest?

Out of Touch or Just Part of the Job Description?

The letter containing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's answers to left over questions from last week's congressional testimony show that the new Fed Chair is pretty much like the old chair, and nearly every economist in the world, when it comes to consumer prices.

Commonly used government price indexes overstate the level of inflation in the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday

In a letter to Rep. James Saxton, R-N.J., responding to questions left over from his recent testimony to the Joint Economic Committee, Bernanke said both the consumer price index and the Fed's preferred gauge, the personal consumption expenditure price index, overstate inflation, but show that core inflation is well contained. Fed policymakers are well aware of the upward bias in the inflation gauges. That's one reason why Fed officials have said they want to keep core inflation measures between 1% and 2%; it gives them a cushion to make sure actual inflation rates don't fall below zero. The Fed has no official inflation target or range.

It's funny how this writer refers to two types of inflation - there's 'core' inflation and there's 'actual' inflation, where 'actual' inflation is actually nothing of the sort unless you narrowly define inflation as being some contrived and contorted consumer price index, which most economists do. The entire letter can be found here (.pdf).

It's Over - Fox Wins

How can anyone not like either of these two? While the performance of both Meat Loaf and Toni Braxton were underwhelming, Katharine McPhee and Taylor Hicks showed remarkable talent and poise throughout the fifth season of American Idol.
The funniest part of the Tuesday night finale, aside from the Clay Aiken wanna-be surprised by the real thing and crazy Dave nearly taking a header into the first row of the audience? The Simon Cowell montage of lip rubbing, face massaging, and breast fondling.

Back in the Saddle

Monday's commentary by Stephen Roach showed some signs of the old vigor. Back to talking about asset bubbles and monetary policy blunders of monumental proportions, maybe he deserves a pass for recent musings about how the odds of a worldwide implosion have lessened now that interest rates in the U.S. are up to five percent.

I worry increasingly that history will not treat the recent record of central banking kindly. Inflation may well have been conquered — a conclusion financial markets are actively debating again — but that was yesterday’s battle. Over the past six years, monetary authorities have turned the liquidity spigot wide open. This has given rise to an endless string of asset bubbles — from equities to bonds to property to risky assets (emerging markets and high-yield credit) to commodities. Central banks have ducked responsibility for this state of affairs. That could end up being a policy blunder of monumental proportions. A new approach to monetary policy is urgently needed.

It is at times maddening to hear economists, even ones who otherwise make a great deal of sense, speak of inflation as if it has been vanquished.

Eventually, They'll All Be Capitalists

It's hard to resist the lure of capitalism. This story about North Korea's "creepy-crawly" brand of capitalism makes you wonder what countries are left out there that haven't let loose the animal spirits of competition and potential for financial reward for hard work.

North Korean capitalism is thriving - just not inside North Korea. Pyongyang has steadily established a string of legitimate and less legitimate front companies across East and Southeast Asia, aimed at earning the cash-strapped government badly needed hard currency. And, by all indications, business is booming.
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North Koreans are becoming skilled capitalists outside their own strict centrally controlled country. For instance, they own a 15-story, 160-room hotel, complete with a nightclub and a sauna, in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang. There, government entrepreneurs also run a North Korean-owned computer software company and an Internet service provider.

Saunas, apparently, are a big deal in Shenyang.

Maybe Next Year

The emerging market rolling-wave meltdown is having an impact across the globe. According to this report, the Mideast stock market swoon from some months ago has left grooms unable to foot the bill for summer nuptials.

The stock market crash, which affected more than 3.5 million middle income investors, has delayed the marriages of many people this summer, Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported.

Every summer, tens of thousand of Saudis get married but this year, the number is expected to drop by more than 50 percent. Fahd Al-Harbi, a wedding hall owner, said that many people who had made reservations cancelled them after the crash.
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Ahmad Ali is another Saudi who lost money in the crash. He said he had lost SR67,000 which had taken him more than five years to save. He said he had been forced to cancel his wedding because he could not afford it and that he would not borrow the money.

Maybe they ought to resurrect plans for the gold dinar as the regional currency - booms and busts are a lot harder to come by when money isn't so easy.

A New Goal, Maybe

Growing a bit impatient at the results achieved so far in the quest to dominate the big search engines for the phrase, "Friday Lite", today another goal will be considered. As you'll recall, in the update from two weeks ago, this blog ranked #1 on both Google and MSN for the phrase "Friday Lite", while coming in 7th at Yahoo!

This week, the top spot is still nailed down at Google and some headway has been made garnering positions #3 and #4 at Yahoo!, but over at MSN the fall has been precipitous, all the way down to #7. It's the usual nemeses again - Strategic Public Relations and The View from Her.

While waiting for weekly repetition to take its toll on the competition, and being a regular reader of two of the blogs below, it is natural to wonder if the name of this blog would ever appear in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Whether that should be considered a new goal for which to strive.
Just the idea of seeing the name there would be a kick, there's not a clue as to how to go about trying to make it happen. The whole idea brings back memories of last summer when somehow this blog came up in a little online text box for a Washington Post story about Alan Greenspan - its still funny to look at - here's the screenshot and a link to the original post.

Good Luck with that Promotion

Two of the more interesting items learned about China in recent years are the lengths to which some men will go in an attempt to secure a promotion, and the relatively low age for consensual sex. According to this story, at least in one case, these two items are related.

A middle-aged man in Nanyang, Henan Province, purchased the virginity of 17 middle school girls, arousing concerns about the education of rural area youths, a Guangdong Province newspaper reported Wednesday.
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Officers captured Deng Jun, 43, while he parked his minibus near the school. Police said Deng confessed to purchasing the girls' virginity. He allegedly had sexual relations with 17 girls more than 20 times, including 12 girls under the age of 14.

The age of consensual sex in China is 14. Deng is in custody but has not been charged. Police did not confirm his motive although there were rumors saying he was seeking good luck.

Deng worked at a real estate company. He found an Internet tip that said having sex with a virgin would give him the luck he needed to get a promotion.

This is the best argument heard so far for restricting internet access in China.

Bobby and Caroline

No, not the Kennedy clan - Robert McHugh and Caroline Baum. Why don't they just get a get a room somewhere and end the suspense? Caroline Baum of Bloomberg writes so frequently about her favorite conspiracy theorist, Robert McHugh, that surely there is desire on her part. Whether the feeling is mutual is not known, but if this story is any indication, Robert should act fast if he's interested.

For uninitiated readers, PPT stands for Plunge Protection Team, which is either a committee of government officials and individuals from private financial institutions created by President Ronald Reagan after the 1987 stock market crash; or a nefarious cabal of the same characters that intervenes surreptitiously to reverse a slide in the stock market.
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The PPT's "main resource is the money the Fed prints,'' writes PPT theorist Robert McHugh on Safehaven.com. "The money is injected into markets via the New York Fed's repo desk, which easily showed up in the M-3 numbers, warning intervention was nigh.''
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I was just about to check some conspiracy Web sites to find out why the PPT was MIA, allowing stock markets around the world to tumble, when a reader sent me a link to some deep, dark background stuff that made the PPT seem mundane.

Written sometime in April, a posting on OSS.net by Sterling Seagrave, co-author of "Gold Warriors,'' says that, according to "sources in the U.S. Treasury, the White House has secretly ordered the Federal Reserve to print two trillion dollars immediately, and put into circulation!''

Robert, if you're not showing any signs of interest in Caroline, perhaps a column or two focusing on her denial of all things conspiratorial, she might just move on. From the looks of this column, she may have found someone new already in Sterling Seagrave.

It's the Flaxseed Oil

The Enron verdict kind of makes you think that maybe Barry Bonds just kept saying, "I don't want to know - stop talking - you're going to ruin it all" as they continued to pump him full of whatever it was that they were pumping him full of.

In this story from The Onion, they have a few suggestions for handling the baseball record books now that the San Francisco slugger has equaled Babe Ruth's career home run total, and will soon be advancing towards Hank Aaron's record at the top of the list.

Commissioner Bud Selig announced Wednesday that, once the Giants slugger retires, his name in the official MLB record books will be forever accompanied by an asterisk, followed by a pound sign and exclamation point, all preceded by the letter 'F'—a string of characters that, according to Selig, "will always be associated with Barry Bonds."

"When my children's grandchildren open up their Baseball Almanac a hundred years from now, they'll see this enduring, universally understood symbol right next to Barry's name," Selig said. "And when they do, they'll immediately know that this sequence of characters - F*#! - reflects history's attitude toward not only the conditions under which he was able to hit his home runs, but also the historical implications he had on the game and its records, the relationship he had with the media and fans during his momentous chase, and just the general atmosphere of baseball in an era he will come to embody."

To you kids out there - stay away from the flaxseed oil.