Sharp drop for economy, IMF warns

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

The International Monetary Fund has slashed its economic forecasts for Australia, warning of a new global recession that would hit commodity prices and drive millions worldwide into unemployment.

Hours before the fund published its unexpectedly gloomy update in Washington, the Reserve Bank of Australia released a statement expressing concern about the global outlook and opening the way for interest rate cuts should things deteriorate.

The Australian dollar slid to a five-week low of US102¢ over renewed concerns about Europe after Italy lost its A+ credit rating. Australian shares fell 1 per cent.

The fund says Australia will grow at only 1.8 per cent this year, down from its previously forecast 3 per cent. The figure is way below the May budget forecast and only half the most recent Reserve Bank forecast, suggesting it will be harder than expected to reach the promised budget surplus in 2012-13. For 2012 the fund forecasts 3.3 per cent, down from 3.5 per cent.

But it points out that these are best-case forecasts, made on the assumption that almost everything goes right.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/sharp-drop-for-economy-imf-warns-20110920-1kjn6.html#ixzz1YXMMI4BS

Sarkozy sold getaway Merc to Gaddafi

I love this story....a Frenchman sells a German car to a Libyan which subsequently allows him to escape capture by the British. No wonder the Russians and Chinese didn't veto the UN no-fly zone resolution for Libya, they could see the comedic value in the Brits and French stepping into a civil war and trying to the recreate the WWII North African Campaign. All that is missing is Rick's Cafe.

Click on the pic below of Ingrid Bergman

Godfrey Bloom - 'Gold isn't rising, fiat currencies are falling'

From: RussiaToday  | Sep 20, 2011

Italians shocked by downgrade

From: Euronews  | Sep 20, 2011

From: RussiaToday  | Sep 20, 2011

Greece considers Euro referendum

By EUXTV on Sep 20, 2011

 

The Real Deal - Greek financial crisis

From: PressTVGlobalNews  | Sep 19, 2011

 

Keiser Report: Dollar-Trapped

By RussiaToday on Sep 20, 2011

This week Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss Babyface Bernanke, Eurotarp and 'rogue traders.' In the second half of the show Max talks to Bill Still, director of The Money Masters & The Secret of Oz, about Fort Knox, state banks and monetary reform.

Repeat after me: Market Manipulation via High Frequency Trading is a Conspiracy Theory

 Remember Market Makers are only there to provide "liquidity" out of their public service commitment to orderly markets, never to front run slower players that are a nanosecond behind the game. Emphasis in the following article is mine.

The best quote I have come across on this subject is: 

"In the race to Zero, a nanosecond is often the difference between profiting from liquidity

or watching your competitors do it" ~ Larry Tabb

From Securities Technology Monitor:

The firm, Burstream, said it can process a new piece of data in 600 billionths of a second, regardless of how many millions of pieces of data stock markets in the United States are generating.

The transmission of market data messages hit a new peak of 6.1 million messages a second on September 12, according to MarketDataPeaks.com, operated by Exegy. Exegy is a supplier of market data appliances.
Burstream Monday is announcing that its NanoSpeed Market Data Mesh service is being installed at the Nasdaq OMX market center in Carteret, N.J. That is in a data facility owned and managed by Verizon Communications.

Nasdaq members get “a substantial trading advantage – ten times faster than hardware-accelerated approaches,” states Paul Barringer, CEO of Burstream. “Our NanoSpeed MeshTM gives proprietary trading firms the ability to quickly and dramatically increase the performance of their latency-sensitive algorithms.’’

The Nanospeed system also streamlines processing by normalizing all incoming market data, so that it can be managed in one steady stream. The data also is kept in active memory, so processing can be instant. Beyond that, a trading firm’s entire order book at a given moment is held in active memory, so it can be acted on immediately.

In addition, Burstream acts almost as a co-location provider. Burstream will maintain trading servers in the Carteret facility, near Nasdaq’s order matching engines.


“Making the jump from microseconds to nanoseconds will ratchet up the competition and could be a game changer for latency-sensitive strategies and certain trading houses,’’ said Larry Tabb, founder of the Tabb Group.........read in full

Manoj Narang on High Frequency Trading

 

Watch the full episode. See more Nightly Business Report.

Italy debt rating downgraded by S&P

From Al Jarzeera:

Standard & Poor's has downgraded Italy's sovereign debt rating, citing economic, fiscal and political weaknesses in the eurozone's third-largest economy.

The rating agency said on Monday that it had downgraded Italian debt to "A/A-1" from a "A+/A-1+" grade because of "Italy's weakening economic growth prospects."

It said Italy's weak governing coalition would "limit the government's ability to respond decisively" to events.

"We believe the reduced pace of Italy's economic activity to date will make the government's revised fiscal targets difficult to achieve," S&P said in a statement.

Low labour participation rates, an inefficient public sector and modest foreign investment flows were cited as key drags on growth.

"In our view, the authorities remain reluctant to tackle these issues," the agency said.

S&P's rival rating agency Moody's has already indicated it is weighing its rating for Italy, which is currently at Aa2, two notches below Moody's top triple-A rating.

Eric Sprott and the case for $1200 Silver

From Saturday, September 10, 2011.  Eric Sprott and Eric King discuss the silver market and the case for $1200......listen here