Another Chinese Resource Grab

The stakes just got higher in the 3-D chess game China’s playing for natural resources. On one dimension, the Middle Kingdom is on the offensive. But on another, it’s playing strictly defense…

Beijing is ordering state-owned businesses to explore a bid for PotashCorp (POT), the Canadian fertilizer giant that’s already fending off a hostile bid from BHP Billiton, the Anglo-Australian mining giant.

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The War on Small Business

Today, we revisit a recurring theme: the assault on enterprise. It was the subject of our symposium in Vancouver in July. In this episode, we look at a particularly vulnerable segment of the economy: small businesses.

To help set the stage, let’s look at some important stats from the Small Business Administration (SBA). Small businesses:

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Dividend Payment Downtrend

By now, everyone and their mother knows the US stock market is a losing bet. The big indexes went nowhere over the last decade, absolutely plummeted in the last few years and now even the 2009 snap-back rally is officially kaput.

Thus, a logical question: Is it time to start buying stocks again?

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Food and Drink Prices to Soar

Today’s report begins with an abominable horror: The world’s most valuable commodity has soared to its highest price in a generation.

Record High for Coffee Futures

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AAA Ratings: A Grim Fairy Tale

How the ratings agencies have managed to emerge from the credit crisis unscathed and unregulated is a mystery…and a sham.

“Nothing is ever clear or certain in public,� we wrote in The New Empire of Debt. “Every error is someone else’s fault. That is why so many men prefer it. The public world is so surrounded in fog that he thinks he sees half-naked nymphs behind every tree and $100 bills under every cushion.�

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Surviving Social Security

“Governments will impose a loss on some of their stakeholders,� reads a new report from Morgan Stanley on sovereign debt. “The question is not whether they will renege on their promises, but rather upon which of their promises they will renege, and what form this default will take.�

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Too High to Notice the Bubbles?

Markets make opinions, the old-timers say. Today, we have empirical proof. Or at least a litmus test on the “mood� out there.

Gone are the days of the stereotypical high-rolling cokehead on Wall Street, says the drug screening firm Sterling. After conducting tests at 270 firms over the past three years, positives for cocaine have dropped 60%…down to just 7% of all failed tests.

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Social Security Turns 75… And Still Can’t Retire

The insane have no idea that they are insane.


Pelosi presents a birthday cake to Social Security.

Seventy-five years ago, in the depths of a depression, with a stroke of a pen, President Roosevelt created programs that would morph into the biggest mandatory spending initiatives of the US federal government.

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Another Milestone for the Chinese Economy

Our coffee doesn’t taste any different this morning. The sun still appeared on the horizon in the East. But today the world is different. Bean counters who care about these things say China has become the world’s second largest economy, effective: immediately.

If numbers from the Far East can be trusted, China produced $1.3 trillion of economic activity in the second quarter. Japan, the erstwhile #2 economy on the planet, produced a mere $1.2 trillion.

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