Evening Reading – November 30, 2010
guardian.co.uk: Kipper Williams on QE3
The Big Picture: Wikileaks: 5GB of Dirt on Bank of America
I have no idea if this is true — the speculation that it is BofA comes via Raw Story — but the most likely banks are the big ones BofA, Citi, JPM, and Wells Fargo.
Here is the sad reality: Can you really embarrass any of these banks? They were incompetently run, with criminally inept risk management. They blew themselves up, and exist today only due to the largesse of the taxpayer. They gratefully took all they could grab and more.
The Big Picture: Differences Between Research and Insider Trading
Josh Brown has a hilarious infographic on the differences between Research and Insider Trading…
FT Alphaville: The SMP to the rescue?
Thursday’s ECB meeting is taking on increased importance as tensions in the eurozone show no signs of easing…
FT Alphaville: It’s a much bigger dollar squeeze this time
There’s been a lot of talk about dollar squeezes this week.
But it’s BNP Paribas who really explain the issue well on Tuesday. As they point out (in their daily FX strategy note) the prospect of quantitative easing in the third quarter led to a significant rally in ‘pro-cyclical and commodity currencies’ as investors prepared for potential dollar debasement.
What all these trades had in common was that they were all mostly dollar funded.
FT.com BeyondBRICs: Chart of the week: moving on up
Talk of emerging markets tends to be dominated by the mighty Brics. Yet as this week’s beyondbrics chart (after the break) shows, the countries that have moved fastest up the economic ladder in the last decade are not those big four, but Nigeria, Vietnam, Peru and Bangladesh.
The Wall Street Journal: Fed Discount-Rate Minutes Show 2 Banks Want Higher Rate
The minutes showed the directors of 10 of the 12 banks voted to hold the discount rate steady.
The directors of the Kansas City and Dallas banks dissented, as they had at a previous meeting on the interest rate charged on emergency loans to U.S. lenders. The dissenting bank directors called for an increase in the discount rate, to 1.0%.
The Telegraph: Gazprom and Shell to develop energy projects together
Four years after Russia forced Shell to cede control of its $22bn (£14bn) Siberian field, Sakhalin-2, to Gazprom, it appears that cordial relations have been re-established.