Huge Dubai debt shock rattles world markets

Published: 2009/11/27 06:34:17 AM
EDWARD WEST

DEBT problems in Dubai struck financial markets hard yesterday, sinking global stocks, lifting safe- haven bonds and driving the dollar higher.

European shares had their worst daily loss in seven months. Gold climbed to a new record high but fell back as the dollar rose.

Banking stocks came under particular pressure because of potential exposure to any bad debt in the Gulf, as did shares in European car companies, some of which are part-owned by sovereign wealth funds from the region.

Markets traded without much input from the US bourses, closed for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Dubai said on Wednesday it wanted creditors of Dubai World and property group Nakheel to agree to a debt standstill as it restructured Dubai World, the conglomerate that spearheaded the emirate’s breakneck growth.

The announcement triggered widespread concern about the Gulf region’s financial health. The worries also fed into nervousness in financial markets about the real state of the world economy.
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FDIC reports biggest drop for business loans on record

By Paul Wiseman and Pallavi Gogoi, USA TODAY

U.S. banks are earning money again, but they’re writing fewer business loans, threatening a fragile economic recovery.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported Tuesday that U.S. bank loans fell by $210.4 billion or 2.8% during the third quarter – the biggest drop since the FDIC started keeping records in 1984. Banks booked $2.8 billion in third-quarter profits, reversing a second-quarter loss of $4.3 billion. “We need to see banks making more loans to their business customers,” says FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair. “This is especially true for small businesses.”

Loans to businesses fell 6.5%, and real estate loans plummeted 8.1%.

“Until small businesses are able to borrow, we can’t have a robust economy, because that’s your largest source of jobs,” says Richard Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago and a federal circuit judge. The Small Business Administration has said that small businesses created 64% of new jobs in the past 15 years.

Banks are reluctant to make new loans until they’ve cleared off the bad ones they made during the housing boom. Back then, they paid “insufficient attention to certain kinds of risky loans,” says Edward Kane, finance professor at Boston College. “You can’t expect them to turn around and turn the lending machine back on.”
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Alex Jones on Climategate: A Hoax and Ponzi Scheme

MUST WATCH!!!!

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Inhofe Announces Climategate Investigation on Fox News

Infowars
November 25, 2009

U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works

Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, today sent letters to several scientists, some of whom allegedly manipulated data to prove the scientific “consensus” of global warming, as well as to the inspectors general of several federal agencies, notifying them to retain documents related to the release of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in England.

“The stakes in this controversy are significant, as it appears that the basis of federal programs, pending EPA rulemakings, and cap-and-trade legislation was contrived and fabricated,” Sen. Inhofe said. “Moreover, it appears that, in an attempt to conceal the manipulation of climate data, information disclosure laws may have been violated.
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Climategate: why it matters

James Delingpole
November 24, 2009

Climategate: still an astonishing lack of coverage in the MSM, the only major UK exception being the Mail which, after years of agnosticism now seems to have decided to come down firmly in the climate sceptics’ camp – here, here and in this article today by the mighty Booker. (Nigel Lawson is able to slip in a mention, too, in today’s Times).

But is that because – as some of the commenters below my post are so eager to tell me – it’s a complete non-story which deserves to get me the sack for being such a rubbish journalist (with innumerable websites dedicated to telling the world just how crap I am, apparently)?

Or does it have legs? (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

This interview with retired climatalogist Dr Tim Ball offers quite a useful perspective.

There’s no point in anyone from the AGW camp watching it: they’ve made up their minds and no quantity of contrary evidence, however devastating, is going to shake their considered position of “Nyah nyah nyah. Got my fingers in my ears. Not listening. The world IS warming and it’s man’s fault. Must tax carbon now….”
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More on those climate emails

Kyle Wingfield
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
November 25, 2009

Complete with a new name: Climaquiddick.

To get up to speed if you haven’t been following this story closely, here’s my post on it yesterday. Short version: A large batch of data from one of the world’s leading climate science centers was released on the Internet last week; this includes thousands of emails and other documents that reveal scientists at the center — people who have been intimately involved in the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — may have been manipulating their data, and certainly intended to foil Freedom of Information requests and keep contrarian researchers out of peer-review journals if possible.
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Hot ‘Climategate’ debate: Scientists clash LIVE on RT

A respected British scientist has admitted that emails taken from his inbox, calling into question many of the accepted truths of global warming, were genuine. The documents appear to show scientists are holding back, or ignoring, evidence. One even suggested using a “trick” to hide a trend of falling temperatures.

Watch the short clip

Aspirin kills 400% more people than H1N1 swine flu

Mike Adams
Natural News
November 20, 2009

The CDC now reports that nearly 4,000 Americans have been killed by H1N1 swine flu. This number is supposed to sound big and scary, motivating millions of people to go out and pay good money to be injected with untested, unproven H1N1 vaccines. But let’s put the number in perspective: Did you know that more than four times as many people are killed each year by common NSAID painkillers like aspirin?

The July 1998 issue of The American Journal of Medicine explains it as follows:

“Conservative calculations estimate that approximately 107,000 patients are hospitalized annually for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)-related gastrointestinal (GI) complications and at least 16,500 NSAID-related deaths occur each year among arthritis patients alone.” (Singh Gurkirpal, MD, “Recent Considerations in Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug Gastropathy”, The American Journal of Medicine, July 27, 1998, p. 31S)

So for every person the CDC claims was killed by H1N1 swine flu this year, common painkillers like aspirin have killed four! Yet you don’t see the CDC, FDA, WHO or mainstream media running around screaming about the extreme dangers of aspirin, do you? All those deaths apparently don’t matter. Only swine flu deaths lead to hysteria.

Understanding risk

According to death statistics tables available on the ‘net, you are ten times more likely to die in a car accident this year than be killed by swine flu.

Nearly 100,000 Americans die every year from adverse reactions to FDA-approved prescription drugs. That’s twenty-five times the number of people killed by H1N1 swine flu (even if you believe the CDC’s numbers). So where’s the big warning about the dangers of prescription drugs? Why isn’t the CDC warning Americans about an “epidemic of dangerous drugs” that poses a far greater threat to your health?

The answer, of course, is that health authorities want to push people to buy vaccines that are about to become worthless (they’re only good before swine flu fizzles out). And the only way to sell more vaccines to people who don’t need them is to hype up a bunch of scare stories by citing bold statistics that make H1N1 swine flu seem really, really dangerous.

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Superstar CBS Reporter Blows the Lid Off the Swine Flu Media Hype and Hysteria

Dr. Mercola
November 24, 2009

Sharyl Attkisson is a CBS News correspondent and investigative reporter. She’s covered Capitol Hill since February 2006 and has been a Washington-based correspondent there since January 1995. She was also part of the CBS news team that received the Edward Murrow Award in 2005 for overall excellence. Additionally, she received an Outstanding Investigative Journalism Emmy in 2002 for a series on the Red Cross.

In case you didn’t realize it, Sharyl Attkisson is the investigative reporter behind the groundbreaking CBS News study that found H1N1 flu cases are NOT as prevalent as feared.

In fact, they’re barely on the radar screen.

How did this startling information come about, and why is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) painting a different picture entirely? I spoke directly with Sharyl Attkisson to find out.

Two Videos

The first video is an amazing interview I did with Sharyl about ten days ago and what the bulk of this article is based on.

The second video is brand new and was done at noon yesterday in which I was videoed in the CBS studio in downtown Chicago. Sharyl was gracious enough to invite me to be on with Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former director of the NIH. We both were in agreement about the swine flu and opposed to the stance the CDC is taking, but we had different views on mammograms.

Please also watch the second interview as it is very entertaining.
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Population reduction: who will make it and who won’t?

Fausty’s Libertarian Blog
November 24, 2009

This is no conspiracy theory.

Mark Wallace posted a rather chilling article and accompanying spreadsheet on Conservative Home on the population figures the Optimum Population Trust would like to see in each country of the world.

Mark’s article:

The Optimum Population Trust, for those of you who haven’t yet come across them, are an odd bunch. Bluntly, they believe the best way to save the planet is to get rid of as many human beings as possible.

On the plus side, at least they are being more honest than most greens in their open contempt for human beings. The reality of many in the environmentalist movement is at core a deep anti-humanism, an arrogant dislike for people who are somehow too stupid to see the problem with their pursuit of a happy life and a healthy family.

On the down side, the OPT’s aims are actually pretty worrying – verging on sinister, even. Buried in their website is a  detailed spreadsheet [Excel link] laying out their ideal “sustainable” populations for each country. And those “ideal” populations are a little worrying, if you try to imagine the reality of them.
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