morph366's  Instablog

My guess is that the SDR (or any other surrogate instrument) will not replace the US Dollar as a result of calm deliberation - it will take another phase of the global debt crisis.

Only when policy makers are staring at the precipice again and realizing that the games up will they come up with a new global unit of account and store of wealth - as before it will probably happen over a weekend with an announcement late Sunday before Tokyo opens.

On second thoughts it might be announced in Shanghai early Monday before New York opens.

What I am finding enjoyable is that those who are bullish on the banks are getting more aggressive in asserting their views again. We may finally have a two-way market in banking stocks again as opposed to a one way market which has been characterized by a complete lack of conviction by the bulls for almost all of the last eighteen months. The sporadic rallies have only arisen from short-covering by the bears on any glimmer of hope or unexpected piece of news, that is perceived as good news by the market.

Tyler Durden, the author of the Zero Hedge blog, and one of the most prolific commentators on the financial sector, is someone whose articles I follow closely. A number of his recent pieces have been extremely insightful and thoroughly original pieces of investigative reporting.

What is rather interesting is that the negative comments being appended to his posts are getting noticeably more hostile.Some of those commenting on his postings are tiring of his sarcasm and what they view as overly negative judgments regarding specific banks. For example here are just a couple of excerpts from comments to a posting he made today at his own blog site and which can also be found at SeekingAlpha which discusses Bank of America (BAC) and its likely need (from his perspective) for a major capital injection.

It is easy to get confused about statistical correlation and the behavior of inverse funds as is found in this article recently published at SeekingAlpha. The author applauds the availability of inverse ETF's and proposes that these will enable retail investors to reduce risk through a process of diversification

[Author's disclosure]
The following piece is written with tongue in cheek and in no way is intended to show any disrespect for the home of my ancestors and for the undoubted suffering being endured within the Irish economy.

Why can't Ireland take a bridge loan from the IMF to build bridges to stimulate their economy?
Hopefully by the time that the bridge loans become due for repayment the activities of the Federal Reserve and other central banks will have reflated property prices around the world enough so that Ireland's banks can be taken private again and the Irish government can pay back the IMF.

If not they can always take another bridge loan to build even more bridges.

If the euro does fall apart - which certainly Germany, France etc will do their utmost to avoid but which may well hinge on how other troubled EMU members react to their domestic crises - e.g. Portugal, Greece and Spain - the systemic consequences would be like a magnitude 8 seismic event.

Surely part of the reason for extending the mandate of the IMF was to avoid such a disaster.

There is an interesting piece at SeekingAlpha about the decline of newspapers and the complaints from Rupert Murdoch, among others, about the way that Google and other search engines/micro-blogging platforms are "stealing" content.

It is a complex and obviously emotion charged debate which I am not going to venture into on this occasion. While I do not wish to question the valuable contributions that have been made by many fine journalists who are currently being made redundant by the collapse of venerable newspapers there are some opinions being expressed that are just not easy to agree with.

For example one of the commenters in regard to the SA article laments the demise of print journalism and goes on with the claim that "Truth, Accuracy, and Neutrality will be the big casualties of all of this."

Many of Mr. Murdoch's publications, to name just one proprietor that has enjoyed way too much power for too many years (on both sides of the Atlantic), have not exactly been big contributors to truth, accuracy and neutrality.

News discovery and investigation, and meaningful decoding/debunking of the PR efforts of governments, is increasingly moving to the blogosphere and written by people that are not on the payroll of moguls.

I would point readers to the blog authors listed in the blogroll on my blog site as some of the best journalists and analysts (that I am aware of) of current events in matters financial and beyond.

Many of these authors are independents and as such do not have to comply with the wishes of proprietors who have axes to grind and political favors to return.