Deflation in needs Inflation in wants.
Sony Corp. is cutting the price of its PlayStation 2 by 23% to $99.99 as it tries to keep the momentum going for the older videogame console, which has been selling well despite the introduction of the PlayStation 3 in 2006.
Sony said the price cut on the PS2, which previously sold for $129.99, will take effect Wednesday. It is also cutting the PS2’s price in Europe to 99.99 euros ($132), but leaving its price in Japan unchanged at 16,000 yen ($165).
Sony declined to comment on whether it would cut prices for the PS3, which starts at $399.99. People familiar with the situation said the company plans to cut prices on that console as well later this year. Analysts expect prices to be lowered by about $100.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123851191140173891.html
http://media.pimco-global.com/pdfs/pdf/IO%20April%2009%20Web%20FINAL.pdf?WT.cg_n=PIMCO-US&WT.ti=IO%20April%2009%20Web%20FINAL.pdf
H-P testing Google software for its notebook PCs
Lets hope that the financial bailouts work better then our control over the Taliban.
The leader of the Pakistani Taliban threatened Tuesday to carry out a terrorist attack on the U.S. capital, and said his forces were behind an assault on a police academy in eastern Pakistan.
Baitullah Mehsud said fighters loyal to him raided the police academy on the outskirts of Lahore on Monday to avenge continuing U.S. missile strikes against Islamic militants based along the border with Afghanistan, a region largely controlled by the Taliban and al Qaeda.
The attack on the police academy, which left 12 people dead, “was in retaliation for the ongoing drone attacks in the tribal areas. There will be more such attacks,” he said by telephone from an undisclosed location. Mr. Mehsud, who spoke with a handful of Pakistani reporters, is based in the South Waziristan tribal region, on the Afghan border.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123847850370972947.html
This is getting to be a very interesting experiment.
TOKYO — Japanese companies are caught in a double bind, facing markets at home that are shrinking with the population as well as the global downturn. Nevertheless, companies must expand foreign sales aggressively — or face longer-term decline.
Exports from the world’s No. 2 economy fell an unprecedented 49 percent in February. But even as Japanese policy makers call for a renewed focus on domestic markets, companies are tying themselves more tightly to overseas markets and innovation.
“Japanese companies themselves just don’t see a future in the domestic market,” said Yasuo Yamamoto, senior economist at Mizuho Research Institute. “They’re looking for opportunities overseas instead of investing at home. That makes it almost impossible for Japan to reduce its export dependence.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/business/global/01trade.html?hp
Gas prices in South Florida edged up to $2.135 a gallon of unleaded in Broward County; $2.152 in Miami-Dade, according to AAA. That’s roughly 6 percent higher than last month. But the prices are still well below the $3.352 and $3.389 gas was selling for in Broward and in Miami-Dade, respectively, a year ago. Average for Florida was $2.095 Monday.
PARIS — Angry French workers facing layoffs at a Caterpillar Inc. factory briefly detained four of their bosses Tuesday at the U.S. manufacturer’s plant in the Alps, a regional official said.
It is the third time in recent weeks that French workers have seized their bosses to protest job losses stemming from the global economic crisis. Last week, workers at a 3M Co. plant south of Paris held the company boss hostage for two days, and earlier this month workers at a Sony Corp. plant held a similar protest.
Workers occupied parts of the Caterpillar plant in Grenoble on Tuesday morning and detained the managers. Police later moved in to clear out the seized areas and the managers were freed, said Chrystele Aubert, chief of communication for the regional government.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123850379569973495.html
Consumers save their e-mail and documents on Google’s data centers, put their photos on Flickr and store their social lives on Facebook. Now a host of companies including Amazon and Microsoft wants government agencies to similarly house data on their servers as a way to cut costs and boost efficiency.
But federal officials say it’s one thing to file away e-mailed jokes from friends, and another to store government data on public servers that could be vulnerable to security breaches.
The push toward “cloud computing,” so named because data and software is housed in remote data centers rather than on-site servers, is the latest consumer technology to migrate to the ranks of government. Companies such as Amazon and Salesforce, which do not typically sell services to the government, want a piece of the business.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/30/AR2009033002848.html?hpid=moreheadlines
The U.S. recession is wreaking havoc on yet another front: the Social Security trust fund.
With unemployment rising, the payroll tax revenue that finances Social Security benefits for nearly 51 million retirees and other recipients is falling, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. As a result, the trust fund’s annual surplus is forecast to all but vanish next year — nearly a decade ahead of schedule — and deprive the government of billions of dollars it had been counting on to help balance the nation’s books.
While the new numbers will not affect payments to current Social Security recipients, experts say, the disappearing surplus could have considerable implications for the government’s already grim financial situation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/30/AR2009033003291.html?hpid=topnews
MOSCOW — To many in the West, Russia’s oil wealth is an addiction that has warped its economy. Russian energy czar Igor Sechin considers that envious nonsense.
Russia’s resources “are a God-given good that should be used effectively,” he said in his first major interview with a foreign media outlet. “Somebody is always wanting to take them away.”
Widely considered the Kremlin’s hard-liner-in-chief, Mr. Sechin is one of Russia’s most powerful officials. He was a longtime aide and confidant to Vladimir Putin before Mr. Putin became president in 2000.
Last year, Mr. Sechin took over as deputy prime minister, responsible for the vast energy sector, when Mr. Putin became premier. Until recently, Mr. Sechin rarely spoke to the media, giving an aura of malevolent intrigue that was fueled by rivals who cast him as the author of the Kremlin’s assault on oil giant OAO Yukos, among other things. In recent months, he has raised his public profile.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123843968759570601.html#mod=testMod
Increased government spending through stimulus plans risks plunging the world into a new crisis and has already sparked a return of inflation, according to the chairman of Nestlé.
Peter Brabeck, one of Europe’s leading businessmen with his role as vice-chairman of Credit Suisse and L’Oréal, told the Financial Times in a video interview that the current recession would be “very deep” and “relatively long”. He added that the deficits being created by many governments meant “this crisis will go on for a long period”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c398c08e-1de8-11de-830b-00144feabdc0.html
Legendary hedge fund investor George Soros said Thursday that US commercial real estate prices will fall 30 percent, a development that he says shows that the financial crisis is continuing.
Soros told a Washington forum that it is inevitable that commercial property prices in the United States will fall drastically. The 78-year-old investor said the price declines will come shortly. Other experts, including analyst Christopher Whalen, agree, saying the demand for commercial property is falling rapidly while overbuilding has created a huge surplus of supply.
Separately, Nomura Securities chief economist Richard Koo says US residential property prices need to fall a further 20 percent in order to bring rental and purchase price ratios back into normal balance. Average home prices have fallen 20 percent in the past two years. Koo believes the rush to pay down debt incurred during the boom years is holding back consumer spending, insuring that the US economy will remain in recession at least another year.
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-03-26-voa71.cfm
The USD’s reign as the WORLD’s currency is going to slowly lose its dominance.
China, which is pushing to end the dominance of the dollar as a worldwide reserve, has agreed a Rmb70bn ($10.24bn, £7.18bn, €7.76bn) currency swap with Argentina that will allow it to receive renminbi instead of dollars for its exports to the Latin American country.
Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said the deal was signed on Sunday by Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, and Martín Redrado, Argentine central bank president, in Medellín, Colombia, where they are attending a meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank.
An Argentine official confirmed a deal had been discussed and said the fine print was being worked out and negotiations were “very advanced”.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/eba6405c-1d7e-11de-9eb3-00144feabdc0.html
Emerging economies must play a bigger part in unravelling global economic and trade imbalances that have helped create the financial crisis, according to Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister.
In an interview with the Financial Times on Monday, Mr Harper expressed the hope that if participants at the G20 summit in London discuss these imbalances, “it isn’t just about the desire or the ‘right’ of emerging economies to play a bigger role according to their growing power, but also [about] their responsibilities”.
The role of emerging economies in the global financial system has been highlighted by such issues as the argument over China’s manipulation of its currency, the US’s yawning current account deficit and moves by developing countries, led by Beijing, to gain a bigger say in the International Monetary Fund.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a9ea3c90-1d51-11de-9eb3-00144feabdc0.html
WASHINGTON – Just months before the start of last year’s stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks. Switching from a heavy reliance on bonds, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation decided to pour billions of dollars into speculative investments such as stocks in emerging foreign markets, real estate, and private equity funds.
The agency refused to say how much of the new investment strategy has been implemented or how the fund has fared during the downturn. The agency would only say that its fund was down 6.5 percent – and all of its stock-related investments were down 23 percent – as of last Sept. 30, the end of its fiscal year. But that was before most of the recent stock market decline and just before the investment switch was scheduled to begin in earnest.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/03/30/pension_insurer_shifted_to_stocks/?page=full
Uncategorized | MacroMan | 
March 31, 2009 4:05 pm | 
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