A Talent and a Cold-Blooded Murder

No one can imagine that LeBron James’ team would lose to Orlando Magic at the 7^th game. Magic, with its cool smile, has dashed all the hopes of Cavaliers’ and Celtics’ and after a long 14 years’ wait, made it to the champion of the East Conference. LeBron James is such a talent, perhaps the best player in NBA and couldn’t perform any better. Well, Cavaliers still lost the game. Is it right or fair? How do we explain that? But a win is a win and a loss is a loss. Once again, the game gave us a bitter and sweet taste of what the competition would have in store for us.

Can Lakers beat the team like Magic? Everybody has a serious doubt now.

China direct foreign investment falls (The Wall Street Journal Asia, 15 May 2009, Page 7)

All signs point to…what?

If recover is underway, that will be a long way before we see the most humming locomotive of the world economy to get above water…

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China direct foreign investment falls

The Wall Street Journal Asia
15 May 2009

BEIJING—Direct foreign investment into China slipped 23% in April from a year earlier to $5.892 billion, a person familiar with the data said, a further sign that economic recovery isn’t yet firmly in place in China. The person, who spoke on the…read more…

Tech Tags: The Wall Street Journal Asia newspaper Economy Politics

Game Over for Wall Street

Game is over for Wall Street. It is not because that a few financial firms were wiped out or the Dow was down several hundred points for the past week. It is the changes in the financial market structure and the finance’s role in the economy that seal off the ill fate of the Wall Street. The lucrative business models supported by the financial derivative trading or the structured financial debt (deals) are collapsing in front of our eyes. Even after the whole mess is over, there will be no glorious days, or just shiny days, returning on Wall Street. As I pointed out much earlier, banks are no smarter than any other businesses or industries– by taking in and lending out money– to make huge profits, without the help of derivatives or leverage. Those derivatives or leverages are simply gone.

So what will happen next? We will probably find ourselves stand on ground zero after clean out the rubbles. No doubt hard days will come for many people. But that is a process that we want to avoid but are unable to shun. The real economy has to suffer and that is the collateral damage of the fallout of this financial episode. We will not go anywhere without this recourse.

So much for financial magic to play with.

 

From Lehman to Lemon

On this harvest moon day of 2008, Lehman Brothers becomes something really similar to today’s moon, in color and in shape but on a smaller scale—a lemon. After 158 years’ existence on Wall Street, Lehman now officially buried its name in the credit market carnage and becomes the latest sacrificial lamp in the name of restoring market order or human sanity. It is insane to see a company with hundreds of billions of capital bankrupt in a hopeless way. It is too much of a drama that time of reckoning is not coming yet for many as denial or rationalization has not run its course.

But one thing we still have to do is to see where Lehman will stand besides those ghosts busted out of those infamous financial bubbles? Too bad I can’t remember those names at the moment, but I get Lehman. That is enough.

It is bad that Lehman couldn’t live to see the sun in another day, but it did die on a full moon day. On this day, we also see the high tide of the sea.

Unlike Lehman, the full moon will come again, for long, long time.

 

 

The Ultimate Game

Fifteen days of the Olympics brought a lot of excitements.

Apart from the “lightening” Bolt’s sensational dashes to 100m and 200m finish line in track and field, Shawn Johnston’s sweet smile in the gymnasium and perfect turn and twist on beam, and not to mention Phelps’ sweep of 8 gold medals, the most astonishing achievement of the Olympics Games in 2008 is the number of world records that have been broken. Through these new records, I see the spirit of sportsmanship and the everlasting pursuit to “Faster, Higher, and Stronger”.

It is how and why the Olympics grab so many hearts and souls. The ultimate success belongs to those athletes, whether they make it to the podium or not. Seeing how they compete in the field and sharing their joy, frustration and even pain is a transcending experience―moving and uplifting.

One more day to go for the 29th summer Olympic Games, but the Olympic spirit stays.

London, in 2012, looking forward to it!

The Unfinished Oil Story

Two positive and one negative factor for the oil price: demand fundamentals are a long-term positive to support oil price and will remain so in a long time to come ; Another equally important factor is that there are a lot of money supplies around the world (except in the US) that cannot keep the eye off the oil market. One negative factor that has chilled the oil market recently is the concern that weakening economies in many parts of the world will reduce oil demand.

On balance, I still see that oil is one of very few positive investment themes with positive underlying fundamentals to support the upward price trend. So far, the concern that oil demand is waning has not been reflected in the weekly US oil inventory report. What has possibly contributed to the recent drop of oil price may be related to the bounce of US dollar that in my view is just a short term reprise of a deep descend. There are neihter monetary policies nor fundamental changes in the US that give sustainable power to the US dollar.

The tehnical chart below shows that it is far too early to conclude the end of oil rally and it wouldn’t do any good to real economy if the price can’t break down the long term blue trendline and drop further.

Although commodities have been in correction for the past few weeks, they have not reached the price level that is low enough to put a much needed relief on the real economy worldwide.

Chart: Light Crude Oil –Continous Contract

 

So You Know Canada?

 

After two years’ living in Canada, my answer is probably “No”rather than “Yes”. I am not the only person who does not know much about this country. Asking those Canadian people, their answers seem not much different from what everybody can say about Canada–”Maple Leaf” and “Hockey”. Those are two most cited terms in a survey to Canadian people on their national identity conducted on the eve of Canada’s birthday. (July 1^st in case you don’t know).

Canada and maple leaf. Yes, that I know, too. The flag is pretty eye-catching.

Beyond that, people would name many things when thinking about Canada, but except a few, many of them do not gain much recognition or prominence both domestically and internationally. So in the quest of searching for its identity, Canada has done quite a few things: its troops fire at Talibans in Afghanistan; its humanity aids (sending food abroad, taking refugee home, or donating money to African nations) are exemplary for most western countries. However, all of this has contributed as much to the debate or controversy over its identity as to the consensus. It is indicative of a young country still searching its heart and soul. It craves for recognition and identity.

To complicate the matter, Canada lives with a big brother down south, and is too much associated with its neighbor south of the boarder. They share very much a common language (although the nuances are plentiful), and they share a big continent where each country carefully guards its own life while trying to be good neighbors. But to many people outside this continent, Canada is too much like a backyard of the America (the U.S.). And to Americans, “Up North” is too quiet, boring, and most of all—cold.

That is probably why not many people connect Celine Dion, Shania Twain, or Steve Nash to Maple Country. Just as Canadarm is attached to the space shuttle to grab things in the outer space, the Canadian aurora is, unfortunately, all whited out in the American halo. Too many people know space shuttle “Columbia”, but very few heard “Canadarm”—because, probably, it is just an “arm”.

But Canadians are very different from Americans. They live their lives in many ways that are un-American. If nothing else, they are one of the most peaceful, warm-hearted, polite and tolerant people in the world. I do not think that they would be willing to relate themselves in any way to Americans.

Fine. Probably that is how Canadians keep their identity without a clear “national” identity. To confuse the two is a mistake.

Indeed, Canadians do not worry too much about what kind of country they live in or represent. After all, Canadian citizens did not exist before 1947. The question– “What is Canada?”– may pique some Canadians on its birthday, yet the country and its people just live on–peacefully and quietly.

We are who we are.

Just like its people, I am still trying to figure out what Canada is all about…

What I can say is this: It is not too bad to be a young country like Canada.

Last but not least—Happy Birthday, Canada!

Celtics–Almost There

At this moment, Celtics is half way to the championship. Twenty four minutes to go and twenty four years later since Celtics’ last championship. This means too much for Celtics!

If you want to see what the power of energy and what the power of willingness can do to a team, watch Celtics play.

Celtics is an unstoppable train, and the crowd in TD Garden is asking Celtics for nothing less than a crush on Lakers.

Watch the game of this final twenty four minutes of this presumably last game of the season. You see what is the meaning of winning championship back-twenty two years later.

Short-term Policy Effect and Long-term Market Force

 

The fundamental problem facing policymakers, academic researchers or market participants are to discern short term policy effects from long term market forces and to address them in a coordinated way. As inflation rears its head all over the world, it is feverishly debated that whether recent inflation will be persistent given increasing food or commodities prices and energy costs or it is just a short-term blip. The problem has not become easier to determine despite the unprecedented speed of information communication and ever increasing amount of data available to us.

The reason for the difficulties of recognizing the source and nature of the problem is because it is a combination of both short-term policy consequences and long-term market forces at work.

Many people, including myself, view that the recent across-the-board surge of prices is largely due to the loose monetary policy prescribed not only by the Fed but by many other central banks of both developed and developing economies. However, that does not mean that the problem is simply a result of the wrong policies on the part of the central banks. It would be relatively easy to solve the problem if the central banks held the key to lock in the inflation animal. Unfortunately, the problem is too big to be handled by the central banks alone.

The current inflation problem is more of a reflection of the fundamental structural problems of the world economy which entails a chain of issues such as globalization, reallocation of production factors, environmental and resources problem. When the major economies around the world stall and face rising costs, policy synchronization is desperately needed but is hardly seen today—without which inflation is hard to be tamed and economic growth misses its launch pad. Against this backdrop, monetary policy without coordination and clear objectives has very limited effects. Lip services of central bankers’ will just have effects lasting by days, if not by hours. It is even shorter than what we can expect.

I wrote not too long ago that the Fed had to take actions to deal with global inflation before oil price shoots above $150 a barrel. But I do not expect that the Fed has such a courage or political guts to raise interest rates given the state of the economy as what it is now, especially at this juncture of time when the general election in the US is five months away. The Fed, for one reason or another, is not willing to sacrifice the economy or employment for a more balanced economic structure. The same conclusion can be applied to almost any other monetary policy authorities in either developed or developing economies.

It is a very tough environment in which the central banks are operating now. The maneuvering space is limited; and the leverage of growth engine is broken. No matter what actions or words that the central banks of the US, Canada, Britain or the EU deliver to the market, they can neither spice up the growth expectation nor fence off inflation—because no matter what they do, they are not addressing the fundamental problems facing the world economy.

Short-term policy will work best when it is aligned with the economic forces to streamline and optimize the resource utilization. This means that economic policies will not always aim at promoting growth. Rather, they are designed to optimize the economic structure and sustainability. Unfortunately, such optimality is rare and hard to achieve when we have too many short-term “fixes” and no long-term vision or policy coordinations. The consequences of the conflicting economic policies against economic rationality would be more damaging in today’s world where globalization and economic integration become more pronounced than ever. In this case, short-term policy will be powerless when confronting market force—in the long term.

 

 

一句话一段的文章

 

 

老师不让写一句话一段的文章, 忘记 是为什么了.

可能是难度 太大了? 一句话一段的文章是很难拿捏 的.

 

西塞山前白鹭飞，桃花流水鳜鱼肥。

青箬笠，绿蓑衣，斜风细雨不须归。

 

–张志和的《渔歌子》, 唐人写的.

 

今人的也有–《成全了自己的碧海蓝天》, 很长,得读几个小时, 不过写得很不错.

老师说的不见得都对. 一句话一段的文章也是 可以写的.

误导.