International Investing

From Mises:

Even more impressively, this is with no bullish news. DailyFX has the full report:
Extending its impressive rise for the eighth consecutive trading day, the high flying New Zealand dollar has hit a 22 year high above 81 cents. This is the first time that we have seen the currency trade at these levels since it [...]

This is from the always entertaining Daily Reckoning. Writing under the pseudonym The Mogambo Guru, the analyst points out that:
The interesting thing is that Treasury Gross Public Debt is now $9.244 trillion, up from $5.65 trillion in the middle of 2001, when the current government-borrowing binge started going bananas, suddenly rising at a steady $50 [...]

With all the talk about the auction failures this is the first article that discussed the accounting changes that caused it. The market was a zombie for months, only propped up by the banks. When they pulled out the whole market ground to a halt:
The demand for auction-rate securities dried up sometime last year, and [...]

Sometimes the best part of an online article isn’t the article itself, but the comments it generated. Below is an excerpt from a Dealbreaker.com post about the failed auctions. While it’s important to take any thing an anonymous message board poster writes with a grain of salt, this poster seems well informed:
I was on our [...]

With bond insurance meaningless and credit markets frozen what will it take to induce investors to buy? In the case of the Port Authority of NY: 20%.
Rates on $100 million of bonds sold by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, with bidding run by Goldman, soared to 20 percent yesterday from 4.3 [...]

WSJ article on the merger of BHP and Rio Tinto:

If you want to understand how the great flows of people and material will shape our future, it’s essential to understand BHP Billiton’s $132 billion unsolicited offer for Rio Tinto. The Anglo-Australian mining companies are the world’s first- and third-largest by market capitalization, which combined would [...]