Lawrence McDonald

Article by Simon Kennedy, Bloomberg The International Monetary Fund is proposing to raise its lending capacity by $500 billion to insulate the global economy against any worsening of Europe’s debt crisis, according to a person familiar with the talks. The Washington-based lender currently has about $385 billion available to lend and wants to lift that to $885 [...]

Courtesy of DC Tripwire Major Actions This Week: White House On Wednesday, President Obama and Vice President Biden hosted experts at the White House to focus on what can be done to encourage businesses to keep jobs and investment in the United States.   On Friday, the President announced a plan to merge the Commerce [...]

Courtesy of DC Tripwire This year, China will undergo several critical transitions, including a change in political leadership, new macroeconomic strategies to continue economic growth, and reforms to regulation on financial markets and investing. Political Leadership China will experience a major leadership turnover in the fall, as current leaders will step down.  Current leader, General [...]

Article By Edward Krudy, Reuters Familiar themes for those who lived through 2011, and investors should be ready to revisit them next year. With a spiraling debt crisis in Europe, political upheaval around the world, and crumbling creditworthiness in major industrial nations, 2011 was a tough year to know where to invest. 2012 is unlikely [...]

Article By Masaki Kondo, Bloomberg There’s been no better currency in 2011 than the yen and strategists forecast more gains, even as Japan promises to intervene again in foreign-exchange markets and expands the world’s biggest debt burden. The yen’s advance against every major currency, including a 4.1 percent climb against the dollar, illustrates the anxiety in global [...]

Article By Paul Panckhurst, Bloomberg China’s lending slowed in November and money supply grew the least in a decade, highlighting the risk of a deeper slowdown in the world’s second-biggest economy. New local-currency lending was 562.2 billion yuan ($88 billion), the People’s Bank of China said on its website today. That compares with 587 billion yuan [...]

From my friend Chris Street:  RAISING THE DEBT CEILING IS KEY TO CHINA DOMINATING AMERICA President Hu Jintao of China is making a state visit to Washington, DC this week to preserve his country’s predatory under-valuing of the currency exchange rate between their Yuan and the US dollar; which has fostered much of the [...]