Interesting Stuff

By Cees Quirijns • April 27th, 2009

Some information on swine flu. Google map with the latest cases & link to twitter feed with the most recent news.

Goldman Sachs’s so-called value-at-risk, the amount the New York-based bank estimates it could lose from trading in a day, jumped 22 percent to $240 million in the first quarter, twice what Morgan Stanley stands to lose, company reports show. VaR climbed 2.8 percent in the same period at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and dropped 14 percent at Credit Suisse Group AG.

While the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index climbed 28 percent from a 12-year low on March 9, CEOs, directors and senior officers at U.S. companies sold $353 million of equities this month, or 8.3 times more than they bought, data compiled by Washington Service, a Bethesda, Maryland-based research firm, show. That’s a warning sign because insiders usually have more information about their companies’ prospects than anyone else, according to William Stone at PNC Financial Services Group Inc.

The Obama administration’s plan to fix the U.S. banking system is destined to fail because the programs have been designed to help Wall Street rather than create a viable financial system, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said.

Stimulus plans and near-zero interest rates in developed economies are boosting investor confidence in emerging markets and commodity-rich nations with interest rates as much as 12.9 percentage points higher. Using dollars, euros and yen to buy the currencies of Brazil, Hungary, Indonesia, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia earned 8 percent from March 20 to April 10, that trade’s biggest three-week gain since at least 1999, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Canary Wharf Group, the London Docklands property developer, has offered to buy back £185m of its securitised debt from bond holders at discounts of up to 85% of face value to take advantage of prices being offered on illiquid corporate debt.

G20 leaders on Thursday declared their summit a “fight back” against recession as global markets surged after they agreed to toughen financial regulation and channel more funds to the IMF. UK leader Gordon Brown, the summit’s host, hailed a “new world order” as he unveiled what leaders said was a $1,100bn package of steps to tackle the global downturn, including a $250bn plan to boost the international money supply.

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

On March 30, 2009, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services lowered its long-term sovereign credit rating on the Republic of Ireland to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA.’

Excellent video explaining why the Geithner Plan is wrong