Irv Slosberg talks about his time as a state representative and his other business ventures after his time in office.

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar's Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong. To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital-to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn't the first clue. I'd never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon ...

Donald Coxe, Global Portfolio Strategist, BMO Financial Group By ROBIN GOLDWYN BLUMENTHAL AN INTERVIEW WITH DONALD COXE: He's convinced that we are in the midst of the greatest commodities bull market of all time. His hunger: food. ONCE A WEEK, LOADS OF INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS DROP whatever they're doing to tune in to Donald Coxe's strategy conference calls. Small wonder. With a keen sense of history and wry sense of humor, Coxe has helped his followers anticipate some of the biggest shifts in markets, be they in stocks or commodities. As global portfolio strategist for BMO Financial Group, a Toronto-based bank that is among Canada's largest, he now sees real hope for two sectors that have been taking poundings: banks and commodities. Though he launched the Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund this past summer, right before commodities took a nose dive, Coxe remains convinced ...

In general, we consider it a good thing to save money and to "owe no man anything save love." But what happens when a debt-happy society wakes up and decides that saving is a good thing for everybody? What happens when banks and hedge funds decide (or are forced) to reduce their debt? What happens when businesses of all sizes find it harder to get loans to operate? In this week's letter we discuss "The Great Unwind," that process of deleveraging that we are now in the midst of. We also explore some recent economic data on the economy. It's a lot of ground to cover, so let's jump right in. 1.2 Million Jobs and Counting The unemployment numbers came out today and they were ugly. October showed a loss of 240,000 jobs. But the really bad part was the negative revision to ...

Here is the latest commentary from John Browne, senior market advisor for Euro Pacific Capital Having received 62.5 million votes, Barack Obama has earned a spectacular personal victory and a clear mandate to bring some form of change to the United States . Obama's decisive and masterly election campaign, where he first had to outmaneuver the formidable Clinton machine, may bode well for his ability to implement a government response of unprecedented magnitude. Time will tell if this is a blessing or a curse. In the short term, markets may likely rally on the grounds that election uncertainty is over and that Obama and a Democratic Congress may institute massive infrastructure spending along the lines of Roosevelt 's New Deal. The larger question for investors will be whether Government spending will make any difference to long term performance, or whether the ...

"...The ideal hedge-fund manager was only just out of college when the Asian Crisis hit. He was smoking blunts behind the school bike-shed on Black Monday 1987. He was still in diapers when the S&P lost half its value in '73-74..." The INVESTMENT TRUST MANUAL for 1928 "was a little book," reports Robert L.Smitley in his Popular Financial Delusions . As the Dow Jones then doubled by mid-'29, the trusts themselves were allowed to float as equity investments on the New York Stock Exchange, and so the next issue "was a big book. The issue for 1930 was a very big one. But "that for 1931 was quite a bit smaller. For 1932 it was smaller than for 1928, and in 1933 it did not even go through the printer's hands." The pace of this growth, and the horrors of its collapse, stood as a ...

Philippe Guttieres talks about the new ventures in multimedia from a golbal point of view.

Richard Lehman continues his discussion with James DiGeorgia.

History of Zinc (from International Zinc Association, (http://www.iza.com/uses.html) Centuries before zinc was discovered in the metallic form, its ores were used for making brass and zinc compounds, its ores were used for healing wounds and sore eyes. It is believed that the Romans first made brass in the time of Augustus (20 B.C. - 14 A.D.). In the 13th century Marco Polo described the manufacture of zinc oxide in Persia. At Zawar, India, both zinc metal and zinc oxide were produced from the 12th to the 16th century. From India, zinc manufacturing moved to China in the 17th century where it developed as an industry to supply the needs of the brass industry. In 1743, the first European zinc smelter was established in Bristol in the United Kingdom. A major technological improvement was achieved in Germany which led to the erection of ...

"You can't blame the king of Persia for printing up money no one could trust. His neighbors in China were doing the same, after all, and with the same inevitable consequences, too..." CREATING MONEY from nothing to try and keep the economy stoked is far from a modern invention. Mistaking extra money for value is a common enough event throughout history, in fact, right from the 99% debasement of Roman coins in the second and third centuries A.D. to the paper hyper-inflation of Weimar Germany in the 1920s. The horrors which excessive money then spawns are a regular feature as well. Yet politicians and potentates still believe they can out-do the ancients...somehow plucking wealth from thin air with better success than everyone else. Most often in history, this futile attempt meant inking a state-decreed value onto the pulp of dead trees. Nine-hundred and ...