Buccaneers hassling your fleet around the seven seas? Time to hire some muscle.
Interdealer broker ICAP are said to be amassing ducats introducing worried ship owners to pirate slaying mercenaries.
And for a small fee you too can be “briefed in anti-piracy preparation and drills”,
Here’s a curiosity.
In RBS’s interim statement, released on Friday, Stephen Hester, CEO of the bank shortly to be 84 per cent owned by the British taxpayer, makes a commitment to transparency. As he states in his third-quarter commentary (our emphasis):
Elsewhere on Friday,
- The dollar as a funding currency.
- Thermodynamics and US executive pay.
- A dollar shortage in China?
- What’s up with the UUP Dollar ETF?
- Lessons for the foreign exchange market from the global financial crisis.
We flagged up a few months ago the curious case of Goldman Sachs’ liabilities: the fact that the bank was generating an interest-income not only on its assets, but in some cases on its liabilities too .
Elsewhere on Thursday,
- Analysing the Fed statement word for word.
- A video with “one of the most influential and yet least well-known people on Wall Street.”
- In praise of ETFs.
- More caution on leveraged ETFs.
The bank that never knowingly made a loss on more than one day during the third quarter has — via its 10-q filing — provided further detail on the nature and success of its trading activities in the three months to September 2009.
The quest for spiritual salvation seems very much on the mind of global banking executives of late.
Bloomberg reports Barclays CEO John Varley is the latest to try and convince god-fearing folk the world over that his industry’s moral code and primary raison d’etre are all good in the eyes of the Lord. Namely,
Elsewhere on Wednesday,
- If the economy’s stagnant, why are stocks up?
- The edge: a golden opportunity remains.
- On the clash of economic theories (and commentators).
- John Paulson once had self-doubts.
Breaking pre-market news on Wednesday,
- Societe Generale Q3 net doubles on investment bank - statement.
- Bank of Ireland H1 income falls 73 per cent to €162m - statement.
- BNP Paribas still looking at Societe Generale La Tribune newspaper says;
Gold prices on Tuesday surged to an all-time high after India’s central bank bought 200 tonnes of the metal from the IMF, swapping dollars for bullion as the country’s finance minister warned that the European and US economies had “collapsed”.
Chinese demand is one of the few bright spots in a generally depressed crude oil market. The phenomenally high amount of crude oil (and refined products) in storage around the world, meanwhile, is a big cause for concern for anyone wishing to see a demand upstick.
US distillate demand data for August tell a bleak tale, according to Barclays Capital. The latest monthly data available , BarCap analysts report, came out at 3.38mb/d, the lowest reading recorded since July 2000.
Back when gold began its first sharp ascent over $1000 per troy ounce in September, we at FT Alphaville wondered what, if anything, the move might have had to do with the IMF’s jumbo issue of $250bn worth of special drawing rights.
So we now have details of the businesses RBS is going to offload to please Brussels, and the revised terms for its involvement in the UK Asset Protection Scheme. Overall, the divestments appear to be very much in line with what the media had been anticipating:
Judging by comments on some of our correlation-related posts, people seem a bit touchy about the idea that the dollar is stoking a cross-asset bubble.
Nevertheless, those saying it is so are standing firm.
Cotton futures have been storming ahead since March this year, echoing bullish moves in many other commodities on prospects of a global recovery:
But with weather conditions still unfavourable for
Elsewhere on Monday, and on the weekend,
- More Goldman - how it secretly bet on the US housing crash.
- Roubini on dollar carry reversal - “he’s only halfway there”.
- Can Citigroup Carry Its Own Weight?
- It’s Japan we should be worrying about.
Denbury Resources, a US independent oil and gas company, said on Sunday it had agreed to buy fellow independent Encore Acquisition in a transaction valued at $4.5bn, including the value of the minority interest in Encore Energy Partners.
Just two days after Saudi Aramco decided to change the way it prices its oil - by abandoning the Platts WTI benchmark in favour of Argus Petroleum’s Sour Crude Index - the CME, owner of the Nymex exchange,
Remember the days when hurricanes and geo-political events made oil fly?
Well, according to Olivier Jakob at Petromatrix, those days — for the time being at least — should be forgotten. The correlations between the Dow,
Elsewhere on Friday,
- Bernanke’s modern encapsulation of Friedman’s bold revelation.
- The story behind WaMu’s demise.
- ‘David Rosenberg makes Nouriel Roubini look like Mary Poppins’.
- If you want to rein in bankers’ pay,
Gold bugs of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your exposure to fiat currencies.
Or so says leading hedgie and Wall Street throw back Paul Tudor Jones, who in his latest missive to investors has gone soft at the knees for the yellow metal:
Elsewhere on Thursday,
- William J Bernstein’s Investor’s Manifesto, black swans, poker…
- Bloomberg kills its most popular feature.
- Back to the VC future: small as the new big.
- Bond bears:
Saudi Arabia on Wednesday decided to drop the widely used West Texas Intermediate oil contract as the benchmark for pricing its oil, dealing a serious blow to the New York Mercantile Exchange. The move by the world’s biggest oil exporter could encourage other producers to abandon the benchmark and threaten the dominance of the most heavily-traded oil futures contract.
Remember those problems WTI crude had earlier this year with Cushing delivery? Remember how they cast a doubt on the grade’s position as a global oil benchmark?
Well it seems Saudi Aramco, the state oil company of the world’s top oil exporting nation,
Barclays Capital does a nice job of assessing the latest back-dated release from the CFTC on commodity index trader positions in the CBOT corn market.
The CFTC statistics, released on October 20, present disaggregated positions of swap dealers and managed money going back to 2006.
The problems facing independent refiners refuse to go away, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Europe’s largest independent refiner Petroplus last week agreed to sell its Antwerp refinery’s processing facilities in a bid to raise much needed cash.
Michael Shedlock of Mish’s Global Trend Analysis flags up a rather worrisome review by some concerned retired auditor folk on the situation facing the City of Houston in Texas, USA.
Indeed, according to Bob Lemer,
There have been some strange goings on in the world of ETF gold bar holdings of late.
Gold bug extraordinaire Professor Antal Fekete shines a light on the case of the SPDR GLD specifically –the largest of the gold-backed ETF funds in the US in terms of money managed.
BP shares soared as much as 5 per cent higher on Tuesday, hitting a 16-month high after the oil major significantly beat expectations on its third quarter results on sharper than expected cost-cutting measures in the period and rising oil prices.
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