Jack the Pipper

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to speak at an excellent conference in Vancouver, British Columbia–The World Outlook Conference. It was a great venue and there were many nice people who attended.

As an encore to the week prior when they increased the interest rate on one-year bills and upped the required reserve ratio on banks, they ratcheted up the rate on one-year bills again.

The Heritage Foundation convened again and published their most recent annual report that ranks the economic freedom of 183 countries around the globe. As mentioned in the Key News section above, Hong Kong claimed the top spot … followed by Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Switzerland.

Let’s look at what the euro has done against the US dollar compared to what the Chinese currency has done since the last dollar bear market began. Below is a percent change chart with the starting date June 1, 2002.

With all the controversy surrounding Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and mama bird NBC … perhaps China would like to slip in and host a show, regardless of whether they get pushed back by half an hour.

Drachma of course is the old currency Greek citizens used to deal with. Could they be heading back to it soon? Maybe!

I guess he was right – the market will be the arbiter of prices for the USDJPY exchange rate. It’s a good thing nobody listened to the New Japanese Finance Minister, Naoto Kan, when he called for a weaker yen as an integral part of Japan’s hoped economic revival.

Is it a Black Swan event when so many people are already talking about it? No, but the China cheerleaders will say it is so…

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times (quoted above) brings back the common comparison to Japan’s lost decade … in hopes of conveying the similarities between Japan then and the US now.

This morning, writing in the Financial Times, long-time Asian market seer and excellent analyst/writer Peter Tasker tells us most emerging markets are looking dicey, given the overvaluation. The biggest problem flows from the biggest one–China, according to Tasker.