CrunchTimes

Banks are pulling commodities traders out of retirement and doubling their salary guarantees as they fight for business in one of the few booming areas in Wall Street and the City of London.
The hiring spree comes after the S&P GSCI, the most popular commodity index, surged this year by almost 29 per cent – its [...]

As central banks continue to splash their cash over the system, so far to little effect, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argues things are rapidly spiralling out of their control
Twenty billion dollars here, $20bn there, and a lush half-trillion from the European Central [...]

The UK looks more like the US than any other European economy (maybe more like the US than any other economy, period). It has:
1. An exceptionally low household savings rate – not far from zero if you exclude savings done by companies on behalf of households when they pump more cash into corporate pension schemes.
2. [...]

Central banks are obviously getting frustrated and effectively desperate in dealing with a most severe liquidity crunch that has gotten significantly worse since August. Even last week’s coordinated announcement of central banks monetary injections has done little so far in reducing the Libor spreads (at maturities from two weeks to 3 months) relative to overnite [...]

What else should we be worried about in 2008?
Else? Haven’t the headlines already been filled with enough fearful forecasts from financial experts apparently keen to outdo each other in their expectations of Armageddon?
Correct, but unfortunately it never rains, but it pours…
…and Yes, there’s another nasty out there, a time bomb waiting to nuke the [...]

A wave of bad economic figures swamped the government on Thursday, a day after the prime minister and the chancellor insisted the UK economy was fundamentally strong and would “weather” global financial storms.
None of the economic data published contained Christmas cheer for the Treasury. The credit squeeze has contributed to the worst public finance deficit [...]

Everybody’s decided to chuck in a couple of grand for a one thirty-one-millionth share in the moribund Northern Rock bank [story]. So far the government has surprisingly been unable to attract substantial interest from private investors, although the chancellor is set to present a case on BBC2’s Dragon’s Den next month. Personally I’m hoping he [...]

IF ONLY…. By: Richard J. Greene, Thunder Capital Management
1. Government spending is out of control with little regard for bringing budget deficits into balance;
2. Trade deficits are mounting toward new records despite a more than 30% decline in the value of the dollar;
3. Inflation rates and employment statistics were actually much worse than the Government [...]

Emergency help for financial markets entered new territory on Monday night as the European Central Bank announced it would on Tuesday offer unlimited funds at below market interest rates in a special operation to head off a year-end liquidity crisis.
The surprise move, which follows last week’s co-ordinated barrage of measures by the world’s central banks [...]

“We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all labourers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the [...]