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CBs And Other "Real Money" Had Enough? Oh oh...... From the forum, wire from Reuters claimed original source: 21. There apparently is a new wrinkle to the intermediation trade between buying from Treasury to sell to the Fed with real money, including central banks, now in on the act. Indeed, several Street sources relay central banks were aggressive offers into this morning's coupon pass, with one letting go of a large block of old 5-years. Other offers too are coming in from embedded Asian real money longs -- in the higher coupons -- also looking to sell size without unduly...

Call for central bank harmony in crises By Ralph Atkins and Haig Simonian in Zurich Published: August 18 2008 23:33 | Last updated: August 18 2008 23:33 Emergency help provided by the world’s central banks should be better harmonised to stop large financial groups shopping around in future for the best deal, the head of Switzerland’s central bank has urged. The possibility that greater integration of financial markets could one day lead to bigger banks going outside their home country for financial assistance when they are in trouble was raised by Jean-Pierre Roth, chairman of the Swiss National Bank, in...

On August 28 the Cato Institute in Washington DC published a report, “Thriving in a Global Economy: The Truth about US Manufacturing and Trade.” The report confuses a company’s offshored products with its import competition and wrongly concludes that US companies with the most import competition are the companies that are thriving. The Cato report never mentions the practice of US corporations of offshoring their production for US markets. Consequently, the report conflates offshored inputs and final goods of US corporations with imports from competitive foreign firms. The report thus confuses corporations or industries that offshore their manufacturing with those...

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Brazil's largest city sold millions of dollars worth of carbon credits at an auction Wednesday in a deal that experts said paves the way for developing countries to make money fighting global warming. Brazil's Mercantile and Futures Exchange called Sao Paulo's sale of $18.5 million in carbon credits to Dutch-Belgian Fortis Bank the first such sale to be held on a regulated stock market and a significant step toward institutionalizing the carbon market. Under the Kyoto Treaty on greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, companies that generate large amounts of polluting carbon dioxide and methane...

Offshoring will flatten wages in the United States and other advanced economies. Global labor arbitrage -- the practice of constantly replacing expensive labor in one location with cheaper labor in another -- has been a cornerstone of corporate strategy for more than a century. This strategy matured over the past decade as technology and higher levels of development in the low-wage nations enabled their workers to take on service jobs and knowledge work; no longer is the practice limited to low-level production jobs. As developing countries provide an increasingly skilled workforce, developed nations' ability to differentiate themselves is dissolving,...

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