Bamboo Innovator

“English Bay shouldn’t become a parking lot for supertankers”; Crude Landlocked as Canadians Join U.S. to Halt Pipelines

Crude Landlocked as Canadians Join U.S. to Halt Pipelines

British Columbia, the Canadian province whose official slogan to its own beauty is “Super, Natural,” is invoking another saying: “No more supertankers.”

That’s potentially big trouble in a nation where oil exports amount to $73 billion annually and the industry employs more than 550,000 workers. It’s also a bad omen for nations, notably China, that have invested billions in Canadian oil projects with expectations that they will one day be able to buy vast quantities of heavy Canadian crude.

To do that means not just pumping it from the vast tar sands — thought to hold as many as 170 billion barrels — lying mainly to the east in the neighboring province of Alberta. It also means building pipelines to carry that heavy oil, known as bitumen, west to the coast. From there, fleets of supertankers will be needed to ship it across the Pacific to Asian markets that desperately want cheap oil. Read more of this post

Olive Oil Displaces Debt at Heart of European Bottleneck

Olive Oil Displaces Debt at Heart of European Bottleneck

It had the same ingredients as Europe’s debt-crisis drama: a battle between north and south, British defiance, media jeering, and murky decision-making starring a cast of unidentified technocrats.

The conflict was put to rest yesterday: the European Union decreed that restaurants in its 27-nation market can continue to put refillable olive-oil bottles on tables, dropping a ban that was scheduled to take effect in 2014.

A week after a little-known committee endorsed the mandate, EU Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos scuttled it, pledging instead a regulation that “takes account of the lives of everyone, not only some, to avoid this sort of misunderstanding.” Read more of this post

Wal-Mart Plasters Stores With Green Dots to Stay Stocked

Wal-Mart Plasters Stores With Green Dots to Stay Stocked

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) is turning up the pressure to keep its shelves adequately stocked by proposing to tie executive compensation to the issue — and has asked an outside auditor to alert workers which items to focus on by plastering U.S. stores with neon green dots.

Earlier this year, Bloomberg News reported that Wal-Mart had trouble keeping its stores stocked as it cut back on workers per store. That has cost sales and driven away frustrated shoppers. In April, Acosta Inc., a Jacksonville, Florida-based consulting firm, began the green-dot program in Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores after previously conducting shelf audits without telling workers what items would be monitored.

The effort Wal-Mart (WMT) is expending to fix its stocking issues is notable for a chain that became the world’s largest retailer in part by gaining mastery over its supply chain and logistics. Read more of this post

Soldiers Turn Entrepreneurs as One Million Exit Military

Soldiers Turn Entrepreneurs as One Million Exit Military

Robert Rummells, a U.S. Army Ranger for 22 years, says it was a natural transition when he opened a Mosquito Joe pest-control franchise in Richmond, Virginia, earlier this month.

“I’m an outdoor type of guy, and I didn’t want to be chained to my computer in an office, talking on the phone,” said the 49-year-old, who tried jobs such as installing equipment at a community college and simulated firearms training after retiring from the military in 2009. “I learned I needed to work for myself.”

As more former service personnel turn to entrepreneurship, they’re generating jobs that are helping to cut the unemployment rate for veterans to a four-year low of 6.2 percent in April, lower than the 6.9 percent rate for adult non-veterans. The boost to the labor market matters: More than a million Americans are projected by the White House to transition out of the military through 2015.

One growing option is franchising. Veteran-owned franchise openings reported last year increased by 11,469 compared with 6,081 in 2010, according to the International Franchise Association, a Washington-based trade organization. Read more of this post

Outrage Grows Over Scandal-Tainted Malaysia State Boss; Despite earning a civil servant’s salary for three decades, Taib Mahmud, the powerful chief minister of Sarawak, is reputed by critics to be one of Asia’s richest man with $15 billion

Outrage Grows Over Scandal-Tainted Malaysia State Boss

By Agence France-Presse on 7:16 pm May 23, 2013.

Kuching. Despite earning a civil servant’s salary for three decades, Taib Mahmud, the powerful chief minister of Malaysia’s Sarawak state, is reputed by critics to be one of Asia’s richest men. Taib, 77, and his family are accused of massive corruption and running Malaysia’s largest state like a family business, controlling its biggest companies with stakes in hundreds of corporations in Malaysia and abroad. A Rolls Royce and flashy jet cover his transportation, while a vast war chest has kept his political authority unrivaled in 32 years in charge of the resource-rich Borneo island state, which remains one of Malaysia’s poorest. “The amount of control he has is astounding. He has been able to dominate politics and society here for nearly four decades,” said Faisal Hazis, a political scientist with Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. But pressure is rising both at home and abroad for action against a man referred to by his harshest critics as the “thief minister” and viewed as the prime example of a culture of corruption fueling public disgust. Swiss-based activists Bruno Manser Fund (BMF), citing financial records, last year estimated the 77-year-old’s worth at $15 billion, which would make him Malaysia’s richest person. Such revelations are hugely embarrassing for Prime Minister Najib Razak, who faces a slide in support due in part to corruption blamed for bleeding the country of billions of dollars annually. Read more of this post

Shares in Britain’s biggest pawnbroker H&T slide as it warns that every 10% fall in the price of gold would wipe about £2m off its profits

Gold price collapse hits pawnbroker profits

Shares in largest British high street gold buyer H&T slide as it warns that every 10% fall in the price of gold would wipe about £2m off its profits

Rupert Neate

guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 May 2013 17.06 BST

Britain’s biggest pawnbroker on Friday warned the collapse in the goldprice will knock its profits. H&T, the largest British high street gold buyer, warned that every 10% fall in the price of gold would wipe about £2m off its pre-tax profits. The stock market warning sent the company’s shares tumbling more than 11% on Friday to 224p. Pawnbrokers have been surfing on the wave of soaring gold prices for the last few years with TV adverts and websites encouraging consumers to cash in their jewellery. But gold has lost almost a fifth of its value so far this year as some investors lose faith in the metal as a safe haven. Gold was trading at $1386 an ounce on Friday, significantly below the $1,600 an ounce price when H&T last updated investors. The company, which trades in 186 shops and a further 24 pop-up “GoldBar” kiosks in shopping centres, made a £12m profit from buying and selling gold last year, buying up more than £40m of gold from customers and selling it on for £52m. Those profits were down from “super-normal” profits of £17m in 2011, when it benefited from the “rising gold price environment”. H&T said it expected the collapse in the gold price would lead to more unwanted jewellery being resold to consumers rather than sold as scrap to metal dealers. “We sell as much as we can through shop windows, and anything that we can’t gets sold as scrap – but that is subject to the gold price,” a spokesman said. “As the price falls we expect more will be resold as jewellery rather than melted down.” Rival pawnbroker Albemarle & Bond has already warned investors that it has been forced to “revise down” its profit expectations because of the gold price collapse.

Malaysia’s newly elected government was locked in an increasingly tense political stand-off a day after several opposition figures were detained under the country’s colonial-era sedition law

May 24, 2013 12:58 pm

Malaysia on edge amid arrests and protest calls

By Jeremy Grant in Singapore

Malaysia’s newly elected government was on Friday locked in an increasingly tense political stand-off a day after several opposition figures were detained under the country’s colonial-era sedition law.

The arrests came less than three weeks after Malaysia’s bitterly contested election left the incumbent government of prime minister Najib Razak in power but the country divided. The opposition has called a mass rally on Saturday to protest the election result.

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim said on Friday the police action against the four detained men – including a senior official in his own party – was “tyranny writ large”. Read more of this post

ASEAN Economies Aim to Avoid the Mistakes of European Integration

ASEAN Economies Aim to Avoid the Mistakes of European Integration

24 MAY 2013 – AARON TIMMS

AS THE EURO ZONE HAS STAGGERED THROUGH MULTIPLE rounds of crisis over the past three years, the nations of Southeast Asia have been looking on with more interest than most. These countries have ambitions of closer economic integration that some liken to the European Union, but regional officials are keen to stress the differences. “It’s important to look at the example of Europe and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes they have made,” says Cesar Purisima, Finance secretary of the Philippines.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), conceived in the late 1960s against a backdrop of regional disputes and an escalating war in Vietnam, has proven remarkably durable. Dismissed by many as an ineffective talking shop, the bloc has grown steadily in size and ambition, forging a free-trade area among ten nations with a combined population of 600 million. Read more of this post

Europe Opens $80 Trillion Shadow Banking Pandora’s Box: Will Seek To Collapse Repo “Collateral Chains”; Banks and brokers face a clampdown on using assets they hold for clients as collateral for their own trades

Europe Opens $80 Trillion Shadow Banking Pandora’s Box: Will Seek To Collapse Repo “Collateral Chains”

Tyler Durden on 05/24/2013 10:51 -0400

In what may be the most important story of the day, or maybe year, for a world in which there already is an $11 trillion shortfall in high-quality collateral (and declining every day courtesy of Ben’s monetization of Treasury paper) so needed to support the deposit-free liability structures of the shadow banking system (as most recently explained here), Bloomberg has just reported that Europe may begin a crackdown on that most important credit money conduit: the $80 trillion+ global shadow banking system, by effectively collapsing collateral chains, and by making wanton asset rehypothecation a thing of the past, permitted only with express prior permission, which obviously will never come: who in their right mind would allow a bank to repledge an asset which may be lost as part of the counterparty carnage should said bank pull a Lehman. The result of this, should it be taken to completion, would be pervasive liquidations as countless collateral chain margin calls spread, counterparty risk soars all over again, and as the scramble to obtain the true underlying assets finally begins.

From Bloomberg:

Banks and brokers face a clampdown on using assets they hold for clients as collateral for their own trades as part of European Union moves to bolster market stability and rein in shadow banking. The European Commission is weighing whether firms should have to obtain formal consent from their clients before being allowed to reuse assets to back other trades, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg News. The consent would be enshrined in a “contractual agreement” between the parties. The handing over of collateral is an integral part of repurchase agreements, or repos — one of the activities under review by global regulators as part of their efforts to regulate shadow banking. The reuse of clients’ assets poses a potential threat to financial stability should one of a chain of firms that handled the securities go bankrupt, according to the document prepared by commission officials and dated May 15. Uncertainty about who holds an asset can fuel panic in times of market stress, according to the paper. “Complex” chains of collateral can make it difficult for investors to “identify who owns what, where risk is concentrated and who is exposed to whom,” according to the document. “This has consequences for transparency and financial stability.” Under the plans being weighed by the commission, banks and brokers holding securities for clients wouldn’t be allowed to reuse the assets for trading on their own account — speculation on the markets aimed solely at boosting their own revenues, according to the document. The Financial Stability Board has estimated that the global shadow-banking system was worth $67 trillion in 2011, with EU-based activities accounting for about $31 trillion.

Here’s the kicker: collateral chains collapse on their own when confidence and faith in the financial system is evapoarting. This is usually manifested in soaring variation margin, and demand for delivery of collateral (which having been pledged at 10 or more different places just doesn’t actually exist). In other words, the last thing Europe needs is to force the aftereffect of a plunge in systemic confidence to be imposed upon the market participants! And yet, it is doing just that.

The mismanagement of Indian cricket reveals India’s wider failings

The mismanagement of Indian cricket reveals India’s wider failings

May 25th 2013 |From the print edition

CRICKET is like a religion in India, it is said—especially by Indians, who take almost as much delight in their love of the sport as in the contest between bat and ball. Nothing, they suggest, unites their vast and varied country so much as its devotion to what was once an English summer game. That is one reason why the epic mismanagement of Indian cricket matters. The other is that it gets to the heart of the cronyism and high-level abuse that plague India more widely.

Every cricket season brings news of a fresh scam or intrigue including, on May 16th, the arrest of three cricketers and a dozen bookmakers for alleged match-fixing in the country’s most popular domestic tournament, the Indian Premier League (IPL). Investigators in Delhi hint that the players were paid indirectly to underperform by the Mumbai gangsters who control much of India’s enormous illegal gambling industry (betting on cricket is against the law in India). If they are right, the nexus between racketeers, bookmakers and greedy cricketers, exposed in 2000 in one of the biggest scandals in modern sport, remains in place. This would not be surprising: India’s government and the men who run cricket there have done almost nothing to dismantle it. Read more of this post

I hate to say it, but what this country needs is another financial crisis

I hate to say it, but what this country needs is another financial crisis

By Allan Sloan, Friday, May 24, 10:38 AM

Almost a century ago, Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, got tired of listening to senators blather on about the nation’s needs and uttered the words that made him immortal: “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” Today, with 24/7 blathering as our national political pastime, let me adapt Marshall’s 1917 remark: What this country needs to get its act together is a good five-alarm financial crisis.

I mean, look around. Except for the Federal Reserve, which has consistently tried to help the economy, misguided though some of its actions may be, about the only real changes our government has made since the onset of the financial crisis were induced by fear. The Troubled Assets Relief Program, which played a vital role in restoring confidence and stability to the financial system, was passed only because the House’s rejection of it on Sept. 28, 2008, set off a 778-point plummet in the Dow. That scared the House into reversing itself. Read more of this post