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Late Night Reading

A few tidbits for your evening amusement:

• Confessions of a risk manager (The Economist)
An insider explains why it is so hard to stop traders behaving recklessly
http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11901591&source=features_box2

• Financial Cowboys Need to Be Lassoed, Corralled (Bloomberg)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_pauly&sid=aU0oYBQcuZ3M

• Repel the calls to contain competitive markets by Alan Greenspan (FT)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3aaef4f6-623f-11dd-9ff9-000077b07658.html

• Uncle Sam's Wonderful Fantasy (Barron's)
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB121763145053806001.html

• Discounters Make July Gains (WSJ)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121810860555720233.html

• Economists: Most Stimulus Went Into Savings (Real Time Economics) http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/08/07/economists-most-stimulus-went-into-savings/

• How to build a US recovery by Lawrence Summers (FT)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c94dd7ac-6417-11dd-844f-0000779fd18c.html

• The Difference between a bull market and a rally in a bear market (Barron's)
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB121797601021014881.html

• 8 who saw the crisis coming......and 8 who didn't (Fortune) 
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0808/gallery.whosawitcoming.fortune/index.html
One year after the credit crunch began, Fortune looks back at who saw trouble ahead, and who just ended up in trouble. (Warning -- click whoring at its finest)

Thursday, August 07, 2008 | 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments

Most of you are aware that the weaker dollar helps the earnings of multinational corporations based in the US in two ways...it makes our exports price competitive and when foreign earnings are converted back into dollars, more dollars come back. The dollar is now baouncing. In fact, from my dollar chart we see first that the dollar has broken above its 200 day MA. Second, by looking at the 65 day (1 quarter) moving avg of the dollar index, we can get a rough idea of how foreign revenue was boosted by the weaker dollar. For example at qtr end on June 30 the dollar was at 73 vs 82 a year ago...so y/y, foreign revenue got an 11% boost. this is quite a boost to earnings. Looking forward though, I believe that if the dollar continues this bounce, by 12/31/08, the boost will be practically zero. Next year it could start hurting foreign revenue.

Posted by: Steve Barry | Aug 7, 2008 8:56:10 PM