Category: News

Nicky Hayden’s youngest brother, Roger Lee Hayden, has been confirmed by the Italian Pedercini Kawasaki team for the 2010 World Superbike Championship season. Hayden will compete on a ZX-10R, a machine with which he has already been familiarized during his AMA racing days with Kawasaki in the United States.

"I am really happy to be participating in the World Superbike Championship next year with the Pedercini Team, Roger Lee Hayden said. It has always been my goal to race in… (read more)

The week before Christmas it was revealed that the health ministers of Japan and Ireland — two countries in precarious fiscal situations — were both dealing with potentially serious problems.

In Japan, the story seemed clearly stress-related, as 77-year old Horiso Fujii was admitted to the hospital, saying he was in fact “warn out.” He says he’ll continue on at the job, however.

In Ireland it was revealed that Brian Lenihan was under treatment for pancreatic cancer. Though he plans to continue at the position, an article in the Irish Independent from this weekend reveals how the government pulled out all the stops to prevent the story from getting out.

Rumours about Mr Lenihan being seriously ill began circulating among political and media circles on Christmas Eve, with some speculation that it might be cancer.

Senior government advisers were in contact with a number of national news organisations, asking them not to run the story of Mr Lenihan’s illness until after the Christmas break.

On Christmas Eve, TV3 director of news Andrew Hanlon, on learning of Mr Lenihan’s condition, called in his senior political reporters and prepared to run the story.

It has emerged that the station’s finance correspondent, Brian O’Donovan, was to report the story.

After speaking with Mr Lenihan’s spokesman Eoin Dorgan, Hanlon decided to postpone running the story until St Stephen’s Day, giving the minister 48 hours to tell his family, including his two children Tom and Clare.

The morning of St Stephen’s Day marked the turning point for the story. The minister’s spokesman, Eoin Dorgan, issued a statement shortly after 11am. In it he said: “The minister is well and enjoying the Christmas break with his family and does not propose talking to the media about anything until the new year.”

By 1pm, it became known that TV3 was intending to break the Lenihan story on its 5.30pm bulletin.

Read the whole story at the Irish Independent — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• The Worst Ever Christmas Of The Modern Irish State
• Irish Politician Yells "F*** You Deputy" During Debate On Deteriorating Financial Situation
• Finance Ministers Of Japan And Ireland Reveal Health Problems In The Same Week

Optifree Replenish und Optifree Express gehören nun Novartis. Novartis hat sich nun doch noch einen grossen Teil der Aktien der Firma Alcon unter den Nagel gerissen. Alcon ist der der Erfinder und Hersteller des Kontaktlinsen Pflegemittels Optifree Express und Optifree Replenish für weiche Kontaktlinsen.
Bereits im Jahr 2008 hat sich Novartis 25% aller Alcon Aktien gesichert und nun gehören total 77% aller Aktien der Firma Novartis, aber das ist noch nicht alles. Novartis plant die gesamte Übernahme von Alcon d.h. sie wollen die ganzen 100% Aktien haben. Novartis plant eine neue Strukturierung seiner Augen Sparte mit Ciba Vision und Alcon. Ob da die Firma Ciba Vision überleben wird ist fraglich. Ciba Vision ist einer der grössten Hersteller von Austausch Kontaktlinsen wie Focus Dailies, Dailies Aquacomfort, Air Optix Aqua und Focus Monthly. Wahrscheinlich werden diese verschiedenen Firmen einfach unter einem anderen Namen verschmolzen werden.
Bin schon auf die „schrecklichen“ Folgen für alle Träger von Kontaktlinsen gespannt.

After fiddling with cooking times, temperatures, and ratios, we’ve finally landed on what we think of as the perfect method for making a pot of steel-cut oats. It’s about time, too, since we have plenty of frigid winter mornings left to go and we’ll need a steady supply of oatmeal to keep us going!

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We’ve come to appreciate MINI for their impressive advertising campaigns. And once again the British car manufacturer has managed to make our jaws drop, as during the holidays it launched a new viral marketing campaign in Amsterdam.

The simple, yet interesting idea was to drop some MINI Cooper huge boxes around Amsterdam, as if Santa brought cars and people threw away the package, creativecriminals.com wrote. As simple as it might sound, the effect was quite powerful and the camp… (read more)

Unicode is great because it supports multiple languages simultaneously, bringing international understanding, universal peace, and planetary love. And so is ICANN’s decision to allow domain names that use non-Latin alphabets. Until both combine to steal your credit card numbers.

Or your login name, passwords, address, or whatever other data a phishing site can get from you.

Until now, there was an easy way to test if a site was legit or not: You just look at the browser URL. If it’s not paypal.com or amazon.com or whatever.com, then it’s not those companies’ web sites, no matter how well they clone their layout and graphics.

The problem will come in 2010. That’s when sites’ URLs would start popping in non-Latin alphabets like Cyrillic. And that’s when there will be cases of mistaken identity: Just check the image above, in which the russian word “raural” becomes “paypal.” According to trademark expert Charlie Abrahams, of MarkMonitor:

The risk for general brand abuse is going to increase exponentially. It’s difficult enough in English. At present, most e-mail phishing does not use anything that resembles the real site name. We could see the level of sophistication in phishing attacks increased by the use of foreign languages.

Can you see what this is going to be bring? Yes, unless someone comes up with rules soon, this will bring a big bag full of hurt. [The Times via Masable]

Note: To those readers who said there’s no “l” in the Cyrillic alphabet, you are right, there’s no “l” in traditional Cyrillic, but there is in the extended Cyrillic supported by Unicode.

Last year, the Internet began to be seen as a basic human right and some countries have instituted legal means of guaranteeing that the vast majority of their citizens have access to a quality Internet connection. Other countries, though, are going the other way, hindering their citizen’s web use and in some cases moving to disconnect them altogether. In France, the heavily criticized and disputed, so-called “three strikes” law has come into effect starting January 1st. Its backers are quick to boast the laws unabridged effectiveness, but common sense points the other way.

The way it stands, illegal file-sharers in France have chances to see the error of their ways and make amends before being sent before a judge and possibly having their Internet ‘privileges’ removed. First-time offenders will be sent an email by the newly formed Higher Authority for the Distribution of Works and the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (HADOPI) warning them to cease their illegal activities. How exactly the agency will determine users’ email addresses, or even harder, the address they are actively using remains to be seen.

If the miscreants continue to show utter disregard for the law and the rights, and wallets, of the media industry, they will be sent an actual letter urging them to stop the… (read more)

A lawyer for acting legend Warren Beatty has denied that that the screen star with a reputation for bedding leading ladies gave his blessing to a new tell-all that claims he’s had sex with nearly 13,000 women.

In Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, longtime Hollywood writer Peter Biskind claims to have befriended the 72-year-old actor and convinced many of Beatty’s high profile former lovers to open up about their relationships with him.

The book dishes details on Beatty’s dalliances with Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Julie Christie, Madonna, Diane Keaton, and singer Carly Simon — who has long been suspected of writing the hit single “You’re So Vain” in honor of the cad. According to excerpts featured in The New York Post over the weekend, Biskind estimates that by “using simple arithmetic” Beatty seduced “12,775 women, give or take, a figure that does not include daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on.”

“I wasn’t the Warren Beatty type, but there I was,” Keaton told the author, according to The Post. “He was just so . . . overwhelming in every way. I remember looking at his face and going, ‘How am I here with this?’ The brilliance and the talent, you get caught up in it.”

In a statement to The Huffington Post late Sunday, the star’s longtime lawyer, Bertram Fields, denied Beatty consented to Beskin’s biography:

“Mr. Biskind’s tedious and boring book on Mr. Beatty was not authorized by Mr. Beatty and should not be published as an authorized biography. It contains many false assertions and purportedly quotes Mr. Beatty as saying things he never said. Other media should not repeat things from the book on the assumption that they are true or that the book is an authorized biography.”

Warren Beatty has been married to actress Annette Bening since 1992.

Welcome back to The Kitchn! After a long holiday break we’re ready to talk good home cooking with you again. But first — a look back at the holidays. What did you end up cooking, giving, and enjoying?

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Jenson Button is more determined than ever to shut out the critics throughout the upcoming season of Formula One, and insisted that the base for securing another title-winning campaign in 2010 is a good preparation before the actual start of the season.

Meaning he’ll have to work very hard to maintain his physical state ahead of the new season, but also create a strong relationship with his new mechanics and race engineers in order to be able to challenge Lewis Hamilton’s No 1 sta… (read more)

Makes sense to me. I propose we jump over five, six, seven, and eight, and go straight to nine. [The Next Web]

(This guest post originally appeared at the author’s blog)

Back in early November we ran a story titled “from one outlier to another”.   The market had declined and recovered from a very deep trough so rapidly that we experienced two incredible outlier events in less than a year – an almost unheard occurrence of such magnitude.  This excellent chart summarized the extreme nature of the event:

In the midst of our research we ran across an equally interesting chart from Goldman Sachs.  While the market may now be at an extreme and in the process of undergoing a remarkably rare event there is nothing that says this incredibly rare event can’t become even more rare.  In other words, this phenomenal bull market just might get even more phenomenal.

If you study the previous 18 deepest bear marketsand pattern their recovery you’ll confirm what the chart above shows.  We are in an almost unheard of top percentile in terms of performance.   If you chart these 18 deepest bears and the subsequent recoveries you get the following:

What’s interesting to note here is that we are perfectly tracking the sharpest of rebounds.  While Goldman views this as a bullish signal going forward it’s also important to note that the majority of these deep bear markets sputtered out from these levels (a thesis I believe is much more likely).

Read more market commentary at The Pragmatic Capitalist — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• RBC: Here’s How To Make A Killing In Emerging Markets In 2010
• JPMorgan: Short The Dollar, Buy AAA CMBS, And Go Long Emerging Market Credit In 2010
• TrimTabs CEO Biderman: Was The Fed Responsible For The Entire Rally Since March?

Toyota will unveil at the upcoming Delhi Auto Expo the company’s latest contraption for the emerging markets, the so-called Etios. Initially aimed at the Indian market, Toyota’s Etios will also be launched in some other markets around he world, including Russia and South America.

Likely to go on sale at the end of this year, the Etios will be offered in both hatchback and notchback body styles, with both versions to be on display at the show. Still, autocar.co.uk writes that the h… (read more)

In a new 2010 outlook, via Bloomberg, PIMCO’s Paul A. McCulley reveals his firm’s uber-cautious stance towards bonds, amid the massive borrowing underway in the UK and the US.

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PIMCO Managing Director Paul McCulley leads the firm’s quarterly Cyclical Economic Forums, in which investment professionals from around the world gather to discuss the outlook for the global economy and financial markets over the next six to 12 months. In the following interview, Mr. McCulley discusses the results of the December Forum and its implications for PIMCO’s investment strategy in 2010.

Q: PIMCO recently developed its outlook for 2010. What are the general conclusions?
McCulley: The global economic recovery underway will likely be very much de-synchronized, borne of heterogeneous initial conditions on display prior to the recession, with a full range of possible outcomes. In the developed world, we had double bubbles in property and credit creation. Much of the developing world, in contrast, had already gone through its “baptism by fire” a decade ago and actually had incredibly sound balance sheets in the public and private sector as a starting point.

In addition to these differing initial conditions, there is still uncertainty over three major issues, which in turn creates a range of possible outcomes in our forecast. Depending on how these issues progress, we’re looking at multiple potential resolutions of the inherent tension in the overall system. There will likely be some bipolar market outcomes. 

Q: Can you talk more about those three major issues?
McCulley: The first issue is the peg between the Chinese yuan and the U.S. dollar, which essentially gives us a one-size-fits-all monetary policy in a very differentiated world. Progress, or lack of progress, on this issue could lead to several outcomes. If China were to let its currency appreciate, it could regain a degree of monetary policy autonomy and a better ability to manage the risk of overheating and asset price inflation. Another outcome, however, is that China refuses to let the yuan appreciate, essentially maintaining too easy of a monetary policy for itself and the developing countries that shadow Chinese policies. This would create bubble risk, particularly for assets such as emerging market (EM) equities and commodities.

The second major uncertainty is what will happen when the Fed completes its mortgage-backed securities (MBS) buying programs. We know that it will have an unfriendly effect on the interest rate markets, but we don’t know the magnitude, because it’s too hard to isolate the supply and demand dynamics between fundamentals and the stimulus programs. The key variables are the “stock” effect, or the lingering price impact of the amount of duration taken out of the marketplace, and the “flow” effect, which is the price impact when the Fed stops buying. They’ll keep the stock, but they’re just not going to be part of the flow any more. 

The third uncertainty is any change in the Fed’s pre-commitment language, which is currently committed to keeping the fed funds rate exceptionally low for an “extended period.” We don’t think the Fed is going to tighten any time in 2010, but long before the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) actually does the deed, it will have to change its language. That could very well happen in 2010, and there is genuine uncertainty over how quickly and strongly the market will anticipate a tightening process. Our gut feeling is that the moment the Fed changes any one of its words, it’s going to be a very unpleasant experience, because the marketplace has very little patience and a very big imagination. The most important book at the Fed right now is a thesaurus, and it’s probably sitting on top of Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis.

Q: Will U.S. fiscal policy play a role in determining the economic and financial outcomes? 
McCulley: We don’t think the U.S. is going to get a new stimulus package, but there will be a hodgepodge of things that fit the description. In fact, that’s one of the reasons that the Treasury has been pushing so hard for the banks to pay back Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money, because the president plans to ask to Congress to move TARP money into Cash for Caulkers and other job stimulus measures. So we will get fiscal stimulus, but it will not be as big or explicit as what we’ve had so far. 

The big unknown gets back to what we’ve already discussed: We’re probably going to have a $1.4 trillion deficit this year without the Fed on the buy side of the market for duration. There is major uncertainty about how the supply/demand equation for duration will resolve itself when the Fed is out of the picture.

Q: With all these uncertainties, what is PIMCO’s global economic outlook for 2010? 
McCulley: Cyclical turning points in the context of secular turning points are devilishly difficult to handicap. It was actually easier to make economic forecasts nine to 12 months ago than it is now. Back then, when the global financial system and economy were caught in the throes of the moral equivalent of a life-threatening cardiac arrest, key questions were simple: Would policymakers go “all-in” with their balance sheets, and would those efforts restore private sector risk appetite? The answers have been yes and yes.

But with the yes-yes answers now in, forecasting is much more difficult as markets navigate improved cyclical conditions within the framework of a New Normal secular outlook. Bottom line is that we have a very real possibility of a wide range of economic outcomes in the new year, and it’s a dangerous game to maintain a religious devotion to any one in particular. We need to weigh potential outcomes not only from a fundamental economic perspective, but from a behavioral economic perspective that evokes Keynes’s beauty contest.

That said, we do have forecast numbers that generally capture the spirit of our discussions: sturdy growth in the emerging markets space, even if less than the Old Normal, and slower growth in the developed countries. Inflation, meanwhile, will probably be too low in the developed world because of still-huge output gaps. What the forecasts can’t tell, however, is that asset price inflation – including commodities – is becoming a more important dimension in our forecast because it’s becoming a more influential component of central banks’ reactions around the world.

Q: How do we reconcile this stronger growth trend we’ve seen in late 2009 with the lower New Normal growth trend in the forecast?
McCulley: It’s true that the fourth-quarter 2009 gross domestic product (GDP) is likely going to be 4%-plus. The inventory cycle is a turbo charger right now. But when we talk about the New Normal growth rate, we’re talking in trends as opposed to single quarters.

The real story here will be told not in the GDP numbers, which are being driven by the inventory cycle, but by real final sales, which will continue to face the headwind of balance sheet deleveraging in the household sector. This is a critical tenet of the New Normal. Consumers can’t and/or won’t augment personal income by borrowing, so consumption must grow in line with personal income. Consumption isn’t likely to get a boost from the increase in stock market wealth because home values – a larger part of individual wealth – are still depressed. Thus, savings rates may stabilize at 4% or 5%, but may go as high as 8%. Additionally, unemployment hurts personal income, as those without jobs have no income and the huge unemployment gap means that even if you have a job, you do not have the leverage to ask for a big raise. 

Q: What are the investment implications of the cyclical outlook? 
McCulley: As we translate all of this into investment strategy, we have to be incredibly cognizant of lingering uncertainties and the full range of potential outcomes. Because that range is so wide right now, our risk-taking is more tame than it would be if we had a normal distribution of expected outcomes. For now, we are limiting overall risk exposures, but we have to be ready and willing to recognize alternatives to the baseline forecast if and when they unfold, and to act opportunistically. 

This all leaves us with portfolios that appear, more than at other times, to be hugging the benchmarks with no bold positioning. Some might suggest we’ve become closet indexers, but, on the contrary, we’re making a very active decision to run light on risk. At this point, we know this is not going to be a particularly high-yielding portfolio. You can only eat what’s in the cafeteria, and right now the cafeteria doesn’t have anything particularly appetizing in it.

Q: How is the outlook being reflected in portfolio positioning?
McCulley: For interest rate exposure, or duration, we are currently cutting back in the U.S. and U.K. because, as mentioned before, supply and demand dynamics are likely to be negatively affected as borrowing rises and central bank buying declines. On the other hand, we remain modestly bullish on duration in the Eurozone, which has been congenitally disinclined to be aggressively Keynesian and won’t face the same degree of reduction in central bank duration buying in 2010. Regarding curve duration, we continue to remain modestly overweight.

With corporate bonds, we are becoming a bit more cautious than we have been. In the third and fourth quarters of 2009, we believed the massive narrowing of spreads we saw in the second quarter wouldn’t go much further. We weren’t necessarily selling credit on any scale, but we’d reduced buying. Now, we’re generally neutral versus the benchmark, but we believe that corporate spreads are still at levels where we see value in carefully selected high-quality credits, particularly in bank and non-bank financials and non-cyclical sectors, such as utilities and healthcare. In high yield corporate, we are adding very select names in telecoms and energy pipelines that we view as “money good.”

In agency MBS, we are underweight, having reduced our exposure as the Fed’s buying programs have dramatically tightened spreads.

Our overall currency target is to be about 3% long a basket of emerging market currencies, generally against the benchmark portfolio currency. Similarly, we’re favoring emerging market sovereign credits, and the Dubai panic gave us additional legroom to enter into these trades. We are also adding to positions in EM corporate bonds.

Though we view Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) as a strategic long-term allocation, on a tactical basis we are underweight TIPS versus the benchmark, reflecting our view that risks are currently weighted toward a disinflationary environment.

We do like Build America Bonds, but are fairly neutral on plain old municipal bonds. The technical supply/demand picture for munis is actually quite favorable, especially since Build America Bonds have accounted for supply that would have otherwise been muni supply. The only thing that keeps us from being all-in on munis is the fact that the New Normal environment will not likely be especially kind to states and localities, requiring extremely careful credit selection.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Everbody Is Obsessed With PIMCO’s "New Normal"
• CHART OF THE DAY: Government Bonds Were The Dumbest Bet Of The Year
• European Commision Warns: Eight Countries Charging Off A Sovereign Debt Cliff In 2010

By Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily

In my Tech Trader column in the print edition of Barron’s over the weekend, I opened up my hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar, which had been sitting on Funk & Wagnalls doorstep for only Karnak knows how long, and provided some prognostications. I reprise them here:

• IT spending booms. Driven by a pickup in the economy, highly improved server processors, the spread of virtualization technology and cloud computing, and the PC refresh cycle, 2010 will be a big year for enterprise-computing companies. Oracle (ORCL), HP (HPQ), IBM (IBM) and the like should thrive.

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