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| Currency | US Dollar |
|---|---|
| British Pound to US Dollar | 1.661406 |
| Euro to US Dollar | 1.499250 |
| Japanese Yen to US Dollar | 0.011326 |
| Canadian Dollar to US Dollar | 0.947149 |
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Editor's Pick
Move shows little confidence in the dollar
The dollar is still losing its luster as the foreign reserve currency of choice.
India has bought 200 tons of gold from the International Monetary Fund at $1,045 an ounce, which is close to a recent record high of $1,070. The entire transaction is worth almost $7 billion.
The move is seen as a way for India’s central bank to move some of its capital away from investments in the dollar.
The IMF may sell another 200 tons of gold in the relatively near future and most experts expect that the buyer will be China, which has foreign currency reserves of $2 trillion and might like to have its own hedge against the value of the American buck.
Eliot Spitzer claims that Treasury secretary Tim Geithner's weak negotiating raised the financial bailout cost to $200 billion. But in reality, the government was way over its head in dealing with this complex crisis.
By Jamie Dlugosch
Sorry, Tim Geithner. Former New York governor and attorney general Eliot Spitzer makes a strong case in the online magazine Slate that you got fleeced in the AIG bailout.
Spitzer says the Treasury secretary's weak negotiating raised the bailout cost to $200 billion.
It wasn't just a failure of Geithner; the reality was that the government was way over its head in dealing with this complex crisis. Wall Street manipulated the markets in creating the crisis and then manipulated the government to extricate itself from the damage.
The Street took advantage of what appears to be a less-informed and ill-equipped government. And in the end, we taxpayers pay for that ineptitude.
What’s worse is that there's no easy way to keep it from happening again. Yes, we can demand more experience in those anointed to protect the taxpayers. But Bush's Treasury chief, Hank Paulson, had deep knowledge of the workings of Wall Street -- and it didn't help us.
So now, how should we on Main Street react then when the Treasury secretary sits idly by as the dollar collapses and commodity prices, especially gold, are going through the roof?
Investors rushing to funds designed for success in a down market. Could the end of the market rally be near?
Individual investors are worried about the market and pouring money into bear-market and long-short mutual funds, Bloomberg reports.JPMorgan Chase and Pacific Investment Management say that people are following the lead of hedge funds and preparing for the end of the stock market rally.
So far this year, they have put about $10 billion into mutual funds designed to protect against falling stock prices, according to Bloomberg. That's more than twice the amount that flowed into these funds in 2006, which was the previous record.
Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway gets a short one-year term at very low rates. Why not longer?
The loan isn't a surprise, especially for a $26 billion purchase. But what has some people puzzled is the loan's term: one year. Why so short?
The interest rate is 1 percentage point to 2 percentage points more than the London interbank offered rate, which is down to about 0.27 percent.
"Isn't borrowing short-term at a low interest rate to buy a long-term asset what caused a lot of problems for housing buyers?"
Thompson Creek Metals raises production guidance while lowering cost estimates.
On Nov. 5, molybdenum miner Thompson Creek Metals (TC) reported third-quarter earnings of 14 cents a share, 3 cents a share above the Wall Street consensus, and revenue of $114 million, well above analysts' projections of $90 million.
The upside came from lower costs at just $5.67 per pound of molybdenum and from higher sales volumes -- up 17% from the second quarter, although still down 12% from the third quarter of 2008.
Molybdenum prices remained depressed at $12.75 a pound, down a huge 61% from the third quarter of 2008.
The best news, though, wasn't in the numbers for the third quarter but in the company's guidance for 2009 and 2010.
Insider trading and the Galleon Group are back in the news, and this time there's a little feminine touch to the story.
By Jim Woods
A Bloomberg.com article, prominently featured on the financial news website's homepage, told the tale of temptress Danielle Chiesi and the role she reportedly played in the sordid insider trading scandal.
Now, in case you aren't up to speed on this story, last month a number of hedge fund managers and corporate executives -- among them one of the wealthiest men in the world -- were arrested in an insider trading case that government officials claim generated more than $20 million in illegal profits. Raj Rajaratnam was atop the list of those accused of using insider information to trade securities in several publicly-traded companies, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Akamai Technologies (AKAM), Google (GOOG), IBM (IBM) and other technology stocks.
Chiesi is an analyst at New Castle Funds LLC, a New York hedge fund that manages about $1 billion. According to the Bloomberg story, Chiesi did much of her stock research in bars and hotel ballrooms. Apparently, her analytical bag of tricks included short skirts, low-cut tops and the feminine mystique of a former teen beauty queen.
Chiesi would reportedly cozy up to technology company executives, befriend them using her feminine wiles, and then persuade them to give up information on how many microprocessors, or how much software their companies were shipping that quarter.
Well, at the risk of sounding politically incorrect, I find myself perplexed at just what Chiesi did wrong.
StockScouter data provided by Gradient Analytics, Inc.
Quotes supplied by Interactive Data.
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