Kada bi tako bilo, kada bi samo trgovinom povećavala zaposlenost onda bi stvar bilo vrlo jednostavna, pa tako je i bilo zadnjih 10 godina. Od auto industrije pa do shopping centara, od plaće, gotovinskih kredita, tržišta kapitala pa do kartica. U onome trenutku kada je stalo jedno, došlo je do pada prometa. Višak novaca koji se refletira kroz kredite (posuđen novac koji se tek vraća, zarada s tržišta kapitala), uglavnom novac koji nije stalan i nema sigurnost da će biti i budućnost, a dok traje, traju i užici otvaranja novih shopping centara, rasta prodaje automobila, nekretnina i tome slično. Po meni PEVEC je rastao kako je raslo sve to, kriza ga je dobrano dotukla je taj višak novaca nije više bio prisutan, a žrtve su ogromne, a to su radnici o kojima se malo priča. Najveći pobjednik je banka, ako ćemo u tim terminima jer sada je VLASNIK PEVECA (nekretnina) a možda i nekretnina radnika koji više ne dobivaju plaću i ne mogu vraćati kredite. [bye]

Is Britain on the brink of financial armageddon?

By James Palumbo
Last updated at 11:07 PM on 27th November 2009

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He’s one of our top entrepreneurs who recently put all his investments into cash. The reason: He believes Britain faces bankruptcy. You may disagree with his bleak analysis but you can’t afford NOT to read it

A year ago, the world reacted with astonishment as Iceland technically went bust. It seemed inconceivable that a modern democratic nation could have such parlous finances that only an emergency $6billion bail-out from the International Monetary Fund enabled its economy to keep functioning.

This week, we witnessed a similar crisis in the Middle East but on a far, far more dangerous scale, as Dubai effectively defaulted on £48billion of loans.

Unless its more prudent and oil-rich neighbour, Abu Dhabi, launches a rescue plan then Dubai – once a gilded monument to financial success – will effectively be insolvent.
canary wharf

Facing doomsday? London’s Canary Wharf. Britain has been hardest hit by the credit crunch

Which leads us to a haunting question: as the country in the world hardest hit by the credit crunch, with gross domestic product (GDP) projected to decline by almost five per cent in 2009, could Britain be next?

Let’s think the unthinkable for a moment. These are the facts.

Even before the financial crisis, the British Government spent roughly £30billion more per year than it earned in tax revenues. This money, of course, had to be borrowed from international investors.

Today, the Government needs up to £200billion a year for at least the next three years in order to meet its spending commitments. But the Government’s estimates invariably understate its true need, and they have to be continually revised upwards.

Before the crunch, total government debt stood at roughly 40 per cent of GDP. It is now around 60 per cent of GDP, but is projected to soar close to 100 per cent in the next few years. But again, that is not the full story.

More…

* UK banks and jobs at risk from Dubai domino effect
* Brash, flash and built on a mind-boggling scale, it was a monument to vanity and greed … now Dubai is sinking under £48bn debts

Treasury estimates of the size of the national debt ignore so-called ‘off balance sheet commitments’, such as Private Finance Initiatives (effectively, hospitals and schools built with money loaned by the private sector) as well as the massive unfunded government pension liability.

There may be other, hidden, liabilities. After this week’s shocking revelation of secret loans of £62billion made by the Bank of England to the Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS at the height of the credit crunch, who knows how many other skeletons remain in the Treasury’s closet?

It is wise to assume that the true size of Britain’s debts could be much bigger than we all think.

Yet politicians of both parties can’t acknowledge this. Why? Because any dispassionate analysis would spell only one thing – we need massive spending cuts and tax rises to avoid heading the way of Iceland and Dubai.

The news is potentially so bad that politicians simply don’t want the general public to know what’s going on.

Given the scale of the crisis, what then do they propose? New Labour is non-committal, suggesting that cuts will be prudent, thoughtful and spare people’s worst pain. The Conservatives have targeted around £7billion of spending cuts, but these won’t happen immediately and are nothing like enough to rebalance the nation’s books.

Besides, one minute the Tories are preaching ‘austerity’, warning that savage cuts are needed, the next David Cameron is telling the City that ‘our strategy has to be for growth, both now and in the long term’.

Such posturing, flip-flopping and vague promises are truly worrying. For, make no mistake, we could be teetering on the brink of a truly epic national crisis – one that makes the financial hardship of the past 18 months seem like a mere inconvenience.

For the past few years, Hollywood disaster movies have shown the world under attack by aliens or being destroyed by global warming. We have all thrilled to images of the White House being taken out by a giant laser beam or Big Ben frozen in an Ice Age snow drift.
Politicians don’t want the public to know what’s going on

A disaster movie involving countries going bust doesn’t quite have the same dramatic appeal, but it would be every bit as deadly as a tsunami hitting London – and we have precious little left to defend us.

We’ve already had one big shock to Britain’s financial system as many of our best-known banks teetered on the brink. The Treasury spent hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ pounds trying to steady the ship. The financial cupboard is now bare. So what could cause the second wave of the disaster?

In three words – a sterling crisis. So far, containment of the crisis has focused on rescuing the banks and pumping more money into the system through the crazy Zimbabwe-esque expedient of ‘quantitative easing’ – effectively flooding the banking system with more cash.

This has cost hundreds of billions of pounds, all of which needs to be repaid if we are to avoid rampant inflation. That means borrowing more money from the international money markets.

But there is a problem. Until recently it was unthinkable that a sovereign nation couldn’t service its debts. And yet this is exactly what’s just happened with Dubai.
Alistair Darling defended the government’s decision to keep the loans a secret

Alistair Darling helped conceal £62bn of emergency loans to UK banks

If international lenders begin to doubt the creditworthiness of UK plc, they will downgrade our credit rating and dramatically increase the rates of interest they charge. UK banks will have to follow suit to match these rates, putting unsustainable pressure on our struggling economy.

Thousands of businesses already hit by the recession will go bust. Trapped by soaring unemployment and welfare benefits, the Government will have to borrow more. And so the vicious debt cycle will continue to spiral down towards national insolvency – and, potentially, social anarchy.

Why won’t our politicians get a grip?

The seeds of a possible future disaster were sown during the Blair years. Blair inherited a strong, stable economy which had been responsibly managed by his Conservative predecessors with acceptable levels of government debt.

He played his first term in office with textbook good sense; it was a continuation of Conservative policy to all extents and purposes, with debt kept at record lows. After that, perhaps because the Opposition was so weak, Blair and his Chancellor let rip.

The massive spending by New Labour on public services during its last two terms was a good idea in principle but a disaster in practice. This was because Blair was not a ‘details’ type of person.

As with the invasion of Iraq, he took wide-ranging decisions on economic planning based on little more than a broad vision, no doubt wishing to feel the hand of history upon his shoulder. Instead of the money being carefully managed, with every penny accounted for as with a household budget, it was sprayed about indiscriminately like a fire hose out of control.

As a result, the Conservatives accuse the Government of ‘not fixing the roof while the sun was shining’. But the problem is they didn’t suggest it at the time. Politics had became so centrist that for the Tories to suggest restraint at a time of economic prosperity would have been electoral suicide.

We are now reaping the harvest of that short-sighted conformism.

Yet even now, no one in power dares speak the truth.

Christmas is only four weeks away; people don’t want to hear bad news. Our politicians also don’t want to be the ones to deliver it (bad news equals lost votes). But unfortunately, as Dubai’s predicament now shows, we’ve got to stop thinking that it couldn’t happen to us and start having an urgent national debate if we are to have any hope of staving off disaster.

The Conservatives are odds-on to win the forthcoming General Election, to be held probably in May or June. There is a view they will not announce the full range of spending cuts they intend to make until it is safely won.

Once in office they can claim the situation is far worse than they envisaged and start swinging the axe. But do we want a party that surfs into office on a wave of optimism, only then to reveal its true character later? This is hardly the stuff of greatness.

The unfortunate reality is what we see with the Conservatives is probably what we will get; decent enough chaps but no Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill to save us in our time of need. An even worse result would be a hung Parliament and the ensuing political paralysis which would almost certainly cause a sterling collapse.

It is understandable that no one wants to talk the language of crisis. Spending cuts and tax rises are not popular concepts. Perhaps it is just a fact of human nature that it is only possible to begin the debate when the scale of the crisis is beyond question. But history teaches us that such obfuscation only worsens the pain in the long run.

Present times are alarmingly like 1939, when the nations didn’t want to accept the prospect of a war, or – if they did – liked to feel it would be over quickly.

Even our then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, delayed, entering futile peace negotiations and refusing to accept reality. It took a great man, possibly the greatest Englishman of all time, to save the nation.

What if the great danger in our lifetime is not a military but an economic war? Who then has the moral courage to take the tough but necessary action?

James Palumbo is a former City banker and founder of Ministry of Sound, the largest independent record label in the world, which had a turnover of £80million last year.

Kak sam se zguštal na iveku ili već tko je ovaj slatki momak. [smiley]

Zašto sam često govorio da nije ono što je, već je ono što nije.

Npr. zabriješ da si zaljubljen u neku osobu, no, ta osoba tebe ni ne poznaje, dapače, nema pojma tko si ti, ali tebu nije svejedno, gledaš je svaki dan, priželjkuješ je sresti i slično.
Slučajno, jednom vidiš je s drugim muškarcem, pa čak u nekoj prilici i priđeš dotičnoj i kažeš što osjećaš a ona samo mahne rukom, a tebi još gore.

Zaključak: nije ono što je, nego ono što nije, ili, ako sam se ja zaljubio u nekoga, ne znači da se taj zaljubio u mene, pa čak i u okolnostima kada ja to žarko želim. Situacija u kojoj ja kupim dionice i zaljubim se u iste ne znači ujedno da ta dionica mora rasti, i obratno kada prodam da ta mora pasti. Nekada se potrefi da bude kako mi želimo, ali to nije predmet rasprave.

Uvijek je obrnuto onog što mi mislimo da je, a u stvari nije. [thumbsup]

King A.
Dajte koju vjest na Hrvatskom jeziku,bit ce nam lakse citat,ovako samo provrtimo.
Da niste vi novi Matrixs ?

Jel to oni bogatun koji je tvrdio da crobex može samo up up i opet up a nakon toga opet up sa 5400 bodova.
Vaš link

The N.F.I.B. data was far more prescient than that of the I.S.M. in predicting the current recession, which began in December 2007, Mr. Shepherdson says. The N.F.I.B. survey signaled a downturn in the spring of 2007, while I.S.M. studies didn’t point to a recession until after Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008.

In its survey, the N.F.I.B. asks small businesses how easy it is for them to get loans. The most recent data shows that credit tightness peaked earlier this fall — the worst levels in 23 years, Mr. Shepherdson says. Although credit continues to remain troublingly hard for small business to come by, that phenomenon is a largely untold story.

“Wall Street focuses on big companies because they are in the Standard & Poor’s 500, but small businesses are still in a very grim state,” he says. “Small-company activity according to the N.F.I.B. is still at deep recession levels.”

And while small businesses do not make up the big stock indexes, they do contribute significantly to the overall economy. The tens of millions of people who work at small concerns are, after all, customers of those big, high-profile corporations like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Whirlpool.

What we all are enduring — and what small businesses, workers and consumers continue to be pummeled by, even as Wall Street wizards jump back into the bonus pool — is the dismantling of the great credit boom of the early 2000s. This necessary but grueling deleveraging began last year and is now in full swing. But it is nowhere near over.

Bank credit outstanding peaked in October 2008 at $7.3 trillion and is now down to $6.72 trillion. Still, Mr. Shepherdson says he thinks that banking-sector loan and lease assets have to fall by an additional $2 trillion. That could take another two years.

“We are in unknown territory here,” he said. “Since the peak in October ’08, bank credit has dropped by 8 percent. That is enormous and it is accelerating. The peak-to-trough drop in the early ’90s was just 1.3 percent and that was enough to scare the pants off the Fed.”

This credit cave-in is the driving force behind the Federal Reserve’s mortgage purchase program, Mr. Shepherdson says. The last thing the central bank wants to see is a decline in the broad-based money supply, because when that happens it usually means a depression is afoot. Money supply didn’t fall in the early 1990s, but it fell by one-quarter during the 1930s.

The Fed’s asset purchase program is therefore not about driving down mortgage rates, Mr. Shepherdson says, but about trying to prevent a collapse in the money supply. When the Fed buys assets it creates deposits, which, in turn, helps offset the credit pullback. If the Fed wasn’t buying mortgages with both hands, Mr. Shepherdson estimates, the money supply would be falling 1 percent a month.

The message amid this gloom, he says, is that the Fed isn’t likely to raise interest rates anytime soon. In fact, he doesn’t anticipate an increase in rates until the spring of 2011.

“I WOULD be astonished if they raised rates in the heart of the credit contraction storm,” Mr. Shepherdson says. “The credit contraction will last for a couple of years and if the Fed is interested in offsetting it, they will have to buy assets through next year.”

Deflating an asset bubble is never fun, and this particular specimen is one for the record books. The binge may have been a blast, but the purge, alas, sure is painful.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-shoppers-hit-stores-but-spend-less-2009-11-29

Investor Sentiment: Waiting For The "R" Word
by Guy Lerner

As expected, last week’s holiday infested market action provided little clarity. The sentiment picture remains relatively unchanged. Nonetheless, there was a market moving event, and the "default in Dubai" will likely leave investors with one of two conclusions: 1) coordinated efforts by central bankers to re-liquify the world economy are likely to continue as bad news means good news — the proverbial punch bowl will be with us for awhile; or 2) the house of cards – otherwise known as the recovery – is beginning to look a little wobbly; central bankers, no matter how hard they try, are unable to fight the forces of deleveraging. This contagion just won’t go away so easily.

The "default in Dubai" is interesting as this now becomes a test of central banker resolve to keep the balls in the air. The US equity rally has been looking a little weak over the past two months and this could be the scare that moves a lot of money to the sidelines. Where there is one cockroach, there is bound to be others. But I suspect this will be passed off as nothing more than a hiccup, and will unlikely derail the bullish fervor. The only thing that can do that is lower prices.

What the "default in Dubai" says is that risks are mounting. This is not "wall of worry" nonsense. This is just common sense after a 60% plus move in the S&P500 over 8 months. Common sense often doesn’t work in the markets, but fundamentals, valuations, technicals, and sentiment do not support higher prices. Dollar devaluation and ongoing Federal Reserve complacency are reasons why stocks can go higher, but this will have its limits I suspect. It is not a reason why I would be a buyer of equities. I am just waiting for someone on CNBC to utter the "R" word: resilient. When you hear that word, make sure you run for the exits.

From my data driven perspective, I will state what I said last week and for many weeks before that:

"The major equity indices are in a topping process. This implies a trading range at best. There is risk of a down draft as markets "fueled" by the proverbial "liquidity" are prone to quick sell offs. The outlier trade is a market blow off or a spike in prices, and I do not rule this possibility out because of the ongoing downtrend in the Dollar Index. It is possible but it is not the high odds play. This is not the market environment that will take you from here to there."

The weak dollar was supposed to fix everything

* by Michael Pento

The inflation redux plan from the Federal Reserve and Washington is based on zero interest rates, massive deficits and quantitative easing, which are designed to bring down the value of the U.S. dollar and create inflation. That is the truth, despite promises from Treasury Secretary Geithner that he really means it this time when he says the United States has a strong dollar policy – the irony being, that he says this while concurrently begging the Chinese to allow the dollar to fall vs. the Renminbi. But their hopes placed in a lower dollar are woefully misguided and all that is being accomplished is to put into place the same conditions that brought the global financial system to its knees.

Messrs. Geithner and Ben Bernanke have been successful in bringing down the value of our currency. In fact, many of the negative factors that were in place before the global economic meltdown occurred have returned in full force.

The trade deficit for September surged 18% to $36.5 billion. That gap was the largest since the beginning of 2009 and largely due to imports surging 5.8% to $168.4 billion, which was the biggest increase since 1993. The news must have been greeted with cheers in D.C. After all, the deficit would mean more dollar weakness and signaled the return of the borrowing and spending consumer. But the news also meant that the strategy of balancing trade by destroying the dollar was not based on sound economics. The U.S. dollar fell from 78.5 on the DXY to about 77 during the month of September. In fact, the U.S. dollar has lost more than 16% of its value since March of this year. If a weak dollar discouraged imports and boosted exports, then why did imports surge by the most in 16 years?

Sorry Ben and Tim, the so-called benefits of a falling dollar didn’t materialize as planned. That’s because the inflation you created to bring the dollar down caused the price of goods made in the United States to become more expensive. Therefore, foreign exporters couldn’t really afford to increase the purchase of American made goods even though their currencies strengthened.

The Treasury and the Fed have also been able to bring risk appetites back to 2007 levels. The massive increase in money printing and government guarantees has reduced credit spreads to razor-thin margins. The Libor-OIS spread measures the spread between the London interbank offered rate for dollars over three months and what traders expect the federal funds target rate will be during the term of the contract. The gap fell to 0.10 percentage point this quarter, below the 0.11 percentage point average between December 2001 and July 2007, according to Bloomberg, and substantially below the record high 3.64% in September of 2008.

Likewise, the Ted Spread is back to the “good old days” as well. Last November, the gap between the 3-month Treasury securities and 3-month Libor was 199 basis points. Today, it is just 21 basis points. But the mispricing of risk that helped bring the financial sector down in 2007 and 2008 is not boosting bank lending to private industry. Bank lending is plummeting for the creation of capital goods and new businesses. However, a broad measure of the money supply, Money Zero Maturity, is up 8% year-over-year. That’s because banks are lending to the U. S. government, which is the only insatiable entity for borrowing that still exists.

So the benefits of a crumbling currency have yet to materialize. However, the ravages of pursuing such a flawed policy have started to arrive. The price of oil has soared and gold is setting new highs every day. Credit spreads are indicating that investors are mispricing risk yet again and the ballooning trade deficit indicates that we once again believe we can consume much more than we produce.

Kako ti volim jedinicu opaliti kad god mogu. Samo zato kaj prepisuješ neke članke, koje bi bolje smislio moj tata, a on je pravi dasa. Jedva čekam sutra kada opet ti keljim jedinice, jer sam danas bonus potrošio.

Niall Ferguson: Even Krugman Admits The Deficit Is Unsustainable
Joe Weisenthal|Nov. 30, 2009, 6:41 AM | 1,473 |comment10
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Tags: Recession, Debt, U.S. Government, Deficit, Paul Krugman

niall fergusonNiall Ferguson is travelling from publication to publication, spreading his message of fear and the end of the US empire, unless we do something to get our debt in check.

This time he shows up in Newsweek, in an attempt to explain how fiscal calamity will mean the end of US military might.

You know the drill: Without growth and sound finances, our gigantic global military endeavors will come unglued, resulting in chaos.

Even here he’s taking shots at his rival Paul Krugman. This is in the context of whether there’s enough global demand for our debt to keep on spending like we ahve.

Could that happen? I doubt it. For one thing, the Chinese keep grumbling that they have far too many Treasuries already. For another, a significant dollar depreciation seems more probable, since the United States is in the lucky position of being able to borrow in its own currency, which it reserves the right to print in any quantity the Federal Reserve chooses.

Now, who said the following? "My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the [fiscal] crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt. And as that temptation becomes obvious, interest rates will soar."

Seems pretty reasonable to me. The surprising thing is that this was none other than Paul Krugman, the high priest of Keynesianism, writing back in March 2003. A year and a half later he was comparing the U.S. deficit with Argentina’s (at a time when it was 4.5 percent of GDP). Has the economic situation really changed so drastically that now the same Krugman believes it was "deficits that saved us," and wants to see an even larger deficit next year? Perhaps. But it might just be that the party in power has changed.

History strongly supports the proposition that major financial crises are followed by major fiscal crises. "On average," write Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their new book, This Time Is Different, "government debt rises by 86 percent during the three years following a banking crisis." In the wake of these debt explosions, one of two things can happen: either a default, usually when the debt is in a foreign currency, or a bout of high inflation that catches the creditors out. The history of all the great European empires is replete with such episodes. Indeed, serial default and high inflation have tended to be the surest symptoms of imperial decline.

Stepping back, Ferguson argues we won’t be so lucky, so as to follow the Japanese model of a permanently high debt-to-GDP model. As he notes, over their multiple lost decades, the govrnment has been able to tap over-saving households and other institutions. But we’ve got no such luck. Everyone’s basically tapped except China and, well, it’s sad that that’s our only hope.