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| Raymond Sabat Editor & Publisher |
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| Columns by Raymond Sabat |
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| Economic Briefing for Thursday June 24, 2004 AOL Engineer Steals Entire AOL Customer List An AOL software engineer was arrested Wednesday for stealing the company's entire subscriber list--totaling 92 million screen names--and selling it to a 21-year-old Las Vegas spammer. James Grant: Interest Rates Headed Up For The Next 25 Years Interest rates will be rising for the next quarter-century. You can look it up. Cycles in the bond market are famously long-trending. In the U.S. yields fell for the last 40 years of the 19th century. They rose for the first 20 years of the 20th century. They fell between 1920 and 1946, then started up again. They peaked in 1981 and fell for the next 22 years, i.e., until June 13, 2003, when the yield on the ten-year Treasury note slid to a meager 3.1%. Now the yield is back up to 4.7%. Harry Schultz: The Ping Pong Ball Dollar ...rising interest rates in the U.S. will at first strengthen the dollar overseas, but will fail to sustain as other nations follow suit. "It becomes a ping-pong game. The net effect is to increase interest rates even and ever further.The result is higher inflation." Sit Back, Relax, Buy A House Fed says no real estate bubble...This FBONY analysis could go down in history as the worst economic analysis since Irving Fisher stated stocks were at "a permanently high level," just before the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. Way Cleared For Seizing Yukos Assets The Moscow Arbitration Court on Wednesday lifted an injunction against enforcing payment for a potentially crippling $3.4 billion back tax claim against Yukos."This means the tax service can act to enforce the claim" and seize assets if the court rejects Yukos' appeal against the claim itself, said Sergei Pepelyayev, the lead defense lawyer in the case. Reclusive Billionaire Twins In Court Room Drama A reclusive set of billionaire twins, an embattled newspaper magnate, a young but brilliant judge.The cast of characters surrounding the Hollinger debacle has changed little in the months since Conrad Black, the Canadian-born peer, was blocked by Judge Leo Strine from selling his controlling stake in the newspaper publisher to the Barclay brothers...But yesterday, Lord Black, who controls 72 per cent of Hollinger's stock, was preparing to enter the Delaware fray once again - this time to demand a shareholder vote on sale of the Telegraph group to the Barclay brothers. Messier Charged In Vivendi Investigation His lawyer, Olivier Metzner, said he had been released on bail, and added that the sum deposited was "less than the prosecutor was seeking". The charges are said to relate to events in 2001 and 2002 when Messier ran the group. He is alleged to have been party to the issue of false information about the state of the company’s finances, and to have manipulated the comapny share price through a 1.7 billion buyback. CBOT Is Cutting Interest Rate Future Margins I find it curious that the CBOT is lowering margins after the enormous volatility in the bond market. In contrast, the CBOT raised silver margins three times and gold margins once from April to May, as Silver and Gold dropped. The margin policy towards the metals was designed to force liquidation, while the margin cuts in the interest rate markets signal a desire to aid the bond carry trade and prevent long liquidation. Furthermore, by raising the margins in the Fed Funds the CBOT is discouraging speculation in the very short end of the yield curve which obviously helps Mr. Greenspan. Private Investor May Be Needed For UAL "I'm not sure who would want to play now.They're a great airline, but they have to get costs under control. Especially the pensions; you're talking billions there." California Produced More Than 3 Billion Bottles Of Wine in 2002 The number of jobs at California's wineries soared 46% between 1998 and 2002 as the state's winemakers added sales and marketing staff to cope with increasing competition. The Chicago Battle Desperate to lure business from their surprisingly aggressive competitors at the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the Swiss and Germans who run Eurex, the world's largest futures market, are eliminating their fees for traders of U.S. Treasury securities. Already, the Chicagoans -- who have decisively beaten back Eurex so far this year -- are shrugging off the move, announced June 22 and in effect from July 12 for the rest of the year. NYSE Seat Sells For 3% Less Than Last Week The New York Stock Exchange said a seat giving its owner the right to trade stocks on its floor sold for $1.46 million, down $50,000, or 3%, from the previous sale last week. The latest price is off 45% from an August 1999 peak of $2.65 million. The exchange has 1,366 seats. Safire: The Great Cash Cow "This was the biggest cash cow in the history of the world," says one of the insiders familiar with the $10 billion U.N. oil-for-food scandal. "Everybody — traders, contractors, banks, inspectors — was milking it. It was supposed to buy food with the money from oil that the U.N. allowed Saddam to sell, but less than half went for that. Perfume, limos, a shipment of 1,500 Ping-Pong tables, for God's sake." At Least A Dozen Teams Trying To Trade For Shaq After a weekend spent hazy on the subject, Kupchak is convinced that O'Neal does, indeed, wish to leave the Lakers. Word spread quickly through the league and by midday Tuesday general managers were piling players on top of players to match O'Neal's $27.7-million salary. VIEWPOINT Wanniski: Saddam Suddenly Looks Innocent I’ll have to admit there is no easy way out for the Bush administration in explaining how it could have been snookered from first to last about Saddam Hussein. I’m not suggesting you ask to meet with the President and tell him he should go on TV and tell the American people he made a Bigtime Boo-Boo. I’m only suggesting you go back to your law books and, for your own good, get a good grip on why Saddam Hussein is behind bars when it now turns out he doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong. You might then be in a better position to advise the President on how to proceed in the best way to avoid further Bigtime Boo-Boos. Rinfret: Bill Clinton, An American Disgrace Our founding fathers conceived of politicians as an elite group of highly educated volunteers seeking to serve the people along with other fantasies.They never conceived of politicians as a group of self-centered liars whose only ambition was their personal enrichment. Rex Reed: 9-11 Electrifies Mr. Moore has obtained amazing film to illustrate the graphic two-hour slam-dunk that follows. In the wimpy reportage that has dominated the media for four years, very few journalists have bothered to investigate the shroud of secrecy surrounding the Bush Presidency that keeps the people ignorant, to write about it, to explain it. Mr. Moore does it with wit and cleverness. There’s no doubt that he would do anything to prevent a Bush re-election, but there is no conjecture here. No embellishment. He doesn’t need any. Dubya & Co. are easy targets: Mr. Moore simply turns on his cameras and lets them hang themselves Be sure to visit the EconomicBriefing.com Blog. For previous editions of EconomicBriefing.com visit the Archives Movielink(TM)-Download 100’s of Hollywood Movies Copyright 2004 Economic Briefing LLC |
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