…Calmly observing the changing world

Argentina is a beautiful country, but its government is anything but. Last week, the government of Argentina decided that it wanted to own an oil company, so it took one.  Nevermind that 57% of the company was already owned by the Spanish oil company Repsol.  President Kirschner’s I am not a thug comments were not exactly [...]

Rick Santorum is not an especially strong candidate for the GOP nomination.  He doesn’t really have any money.  He tells the whole truth way too often for his own political good.  And, it probably doesn’t help that his campaign seems to be based on two principles that no one has ever heard of and that [...]

Mitt Romney’s campaign threw down the gauntlet last week saying that it would take an act of God for a candidate not named Romney to win the nomination.  Not surprisingly, this led Rick Santorum to quip “Acts of God? Yeah, I believe in those.” But what do the numbers really say?  Is it a forgone [...]

There is an entire (extremely profitable) business devoted to selling insurance against the default of bonds.  This allows an investor to purchase a riskier bond than he otherwise would (say, a Italian bond), and still feel safe – since he purchased insurance on his bond. This insurance is known as a credit default swap that we [...]

One of the realities of life is that debt skews a relationship.  Mostly because the lender wants his money back, and assurances of repayment only work for so long. And if the lender is Germany and the debtor is Greece, the time has come for something even more drastic in Germany’s eyes.  Jokes about island [...]

Property rights may be under assault in the United States, but we would do well to remember that there are some places in the world where they don’t even exist.  One of those places is China. You know, the kind of place where the workers of the world unite only to find out that somehow [...]

Everyone knows that times are tough, and also that the banks have been on very shaky ground.  If you were a bank, you’d probably be pretty worried. And the banks know better than everyone else just how bad off they are.  Such a bank might think long and hard about just how to protect itself and come [...]

The whole financial news community is eager, if sometimes cautious, to call a top in gold.  ”The bubble is bursting!”, they long to say.  Nevermind that these are the same people who thought gold was overpriced at $400. What is that gold going to do for you anyway? Just listen to Charles L. Sizemore complain: [...]

When you are a small nation in the Alps and the currency of the countries around you is – how shall we say – in jeopardy, you might think you’d take some pride in your homeland.  You might think they’d pat themselves on the back for staying out of the Eurozone, and successfully forging their [...]

As the world develops a pleasant Libyan narrative that it hopes is true, fissures occasionally appear in the story.  Reality has a way of curbing our enthusiasm like that.  An interesting bit of reality caught my eye today: According to Baja, Qaddafi loyalists in Sirte have two options: “To speed up the negotiations process and [...]