Bank of International Settlements has released a new report on what led to the financial crisis and the coordinated internatonal respons. According to the report the crisis was initially caused by large european banks that went on a buying spree with borrowed low priced dollars, and at the same time became more depending on short time [...]

The U.S. stock market has run up magnificently in the last six months. The U.S. economy has begun to recover, but its performance has fallen short of expectations.

And with good reason. The United States has a bigger and more-troubled financial sector than most countries. It also has a bigger overhang from the housing bubble, has a bigger balance-of-payments deficit and has a budget deficit that’s fat enough to stall the recovery.

It would be nice to have an economic recovery to invest in that didn’t have all of these problems.

Truth be told, such an investment play does exist. What’s more, the market I have in mind is advanced enough for us to invest in it without having to go through all the rigmarole of American Depository Receipt (ADR) investing. Nor will you have to make a potentially risky foray out onto some foreign stock exchange to buy the

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Recently, I had the unique opportunity to tour two different oil sands operations near Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta. I saw a massive open-pit oil sands mine, and the associated reclamation effort, operated by Syncrude Canada Ltd. I also visited an in situ oil sands recovery project called Surmont, operated by ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP).

The trip was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute (API), which paid for the airfare and accommodations. Managers at both Syncrude and ConocoPhillips granted me access to any parts of their operations I wanted to see (within allowances for safety). And everyone answered any and all questions I asked.

Post-trip, I have complete editorial freedom to write about what I saw and learned. And I learned a lot. So this is Part I of a two-part series. Watch for Part II.

The Past and Future of Oil and Oil Sands

The first thing that struck me about visiting

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The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has reached an agreement with the Bank of East Asia on an equity transaction, in which ICBC will acquire a 70% stake in the Canadian subsidiary of BEA for CAD80.25 million. Under the agreement, ICBC will pay CAD80.25 million, to acquire the 70% stake while BEA will hold the [...]

[Editor's Note:When the journalistic sleuths at Slate magazine recently set out to identify the stock-market guru who correctly predicted how far U.S. stocks would fall because of the global financial crisis, the respected "e-zine" concluded it was Martin Hutchinson who "called" the market bottom.

That discovery was no surprise to the readers of Money Morning - after all, Hutchinson has made a bevy of such savvy predictions since this publication was launched. Hutchinson warned investors about the evils of credit default swaps six months before the complex derivatives KO'd insurer American International Group Inc. He predicted the record run that gold made last year - back in 2007. Then, last fall - as Slate discovered - Hutchinson "called" the market bottom.

Now investors face an unpredictable stock market that's back-dropped by an uncertain economy. No matter. Hutchinson has developed a strategy that's tailor-made for such a directionless market, and that ...

It was bound to happen, I suppose. While exchange-traded funds have not yet attracted the multi-trillions of dollars that mutual funds have, ETFs have become popular enough they’re starting to acquire some of the bad habits of their older rivals.

The first generation of ETFs were low-cost, broadly diversified products from firms like Barclays and Vanguard, well suited to average investors wishing to expose the core of their portfolios to the broad equity market.

But we are well into the second phase of ETF proliferation, with more volatile sector ETFs sporting considerably higher price tags. How complex it’s become can be inferred from the fact BetaPro Management Inc. is hosting an all-day Horizons ETF University session today at Ryerson University, part of a seven-city road show. 

BetaPro came under fire last week from consumer advocacy group FAIR for not disclosing clearly enough

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Jim Rogers recently spent an hour with Bloomberg. Key points from his interview:Stocks and Bonds are too risky and Jim wants to stay away.He likes commodities and specially agriculture, due to lack of farmers, farming and shortage of food and fertilizer.He thinks government should let banks go belly-up and stop flooding the market with dollars.Dollar is not a good currency to be in and neither isdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?a=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:XhI0_UKdTUU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?i=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:XhI0_UKdTUU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?a=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?a=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?a=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?i=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?a=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:qj6IDK7rITs"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?a=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:gIN9vFwOqvQ"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?i=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?a=mQzRxhp7rEw:9G6EQgQGSXY:dnMXMwOfBR0"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/StocksAdvice?d=dnMXMwOfBR0" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/StocksAdvice/~4/mQzRxhp7rEw" height="1" width="1"/

With oil finally trading back above the $50-a-barrel level, it’s time to recognize that crude prices are probably not going to remain low for very long, and may end up fluctuating in the $50-$80 range - regardless of what happens to the prices of other commodities. After all, the economies in both China and India are apparently continuing to grow at a fairly rapid pace, and those countries’ demand for transportation and other forms of energy are thus likely to keep pace. For some minerals, the period of high prices from 2005 to 2008 has produced a surplus. But no such effect has been seen in the oil market, as large new discoveries are hard to find. If we’ve learned anything in the last few years, it’s that political risk is very important in oil investments. It’s not just a question of outright ...

Last week’s news that the unemployment rate is soaring wasn’t met with surprise; but what is news is how many educated and employable people are jumping on the jobless bandwagon. As the Economix blog smartly reports, the number of college graduates with jobs fell 282,000 last month - but just 2,000 of them have looked for a job in the last four weeks. So why are 280,000 educated and unemployed moving from Midtown to Slowdown?  It’s a hard fall from Wall Street to the workforce, and fired financiers are no different from the rest of us; its tough to find a job in Christmastime.

So what are all those idle bankers betting on this holiday season?  Well, depends which bank fired them!

Citigroup - Abercrombie and Fitch (NYSE:ANF)

We all know the kind of guy that goes to work at Citigroup - he wore the polo shirt with the collar

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Thanks to Gary, who contributed this comment on a post about the Baltic Dry Index a week ago -

“What great time to buy shipping stocks - before you know it demand will be back because pent-up demand will force products to ship. Stocks like Genco (GNK) and others will expode again.”

  View the full GNK chart at Wikinvest

Not sure about the “explosion” you’re anticipating, Gary, but I’ve got to agree with you on this point - demand for the dry bulk shippers will be back. Dry bulk goods, like metals and grains, are the foundation of economic growth - and even as the world’s economy shrinks in the short term, its population (and corresponding demand for food, energy, and consumer products) continue to grow in the long term.

If only I had paid attention to Gary’s advice on Friday afternoon and pulled the trigger on a dry bulk

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