Just got this bit of news from AP:

Medvedev wrote Saturday to French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- who, holding the EU presidency at the time, authored an Aug. 12 peace plan -- to thank him for the "big role" he played in ending the hostilities.

Medvedev wrote that the cease-fire agreement "remains the only code of behavior" in the region and that Russia has fulfilled its obligations under it.

I hate to be stickler for details, but Russia has most certainly has not fulfilled the terms of the Sarkozy-brokered truce, which required a retreat to pre-war positions on both sides.

In late January, Exxon Mobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM), the world’s most ubiquitous oil giant, capped off a whipsaw year in the global oil markets by reporting net income of $45.2 billion, an all-time record for corporate profits that shattered the former record it had set a year before.

The number was so big and the results beat Wall Street estimates by so much at a time when the credit crisis was wreaking havoc on so many other sectors that Oppenheimer & Sons (NYSE: OPY) oil analyst Fadel Gheit couldn’t help but quip that he didn’t think Exxon “will be lining up for any TARP money or government handout anytime soon.”

Exxon wasn’t the only heavyweight reaping the benefit of a zooming energy market that had seen crude oil climb to an all-time record of $147 a barrel in July. The combined revenue for

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You can’t go back. So don’t assume that as the U.S. and the West recovers, they’ll attract foreign capital just like they did before the recession. It’s a far different landscape now. The easy-credit bubbles are gone. And they’ve left us with a hellacious debt burden.

The U.S. debt is expected to zoom to $16.2 trillion by 2012, almost equal to its projected GDP. Italy’s debt is expected to reach 120% next year. France’s debt will approach 90% next year (if President Nicolas Sarkozy goes ahead with his fiscal blitz). All told, by next year, Europe’s debt should rise to about 80 percent of GDP. And then there’s Japan. Its public debt is headed toward unfathomable depths. It should reach 240% of GDP by 2014.

After buying $600 billion in U.S. assets last year, China, for example, is having second thoughts. It won’t come close to matching that number this

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This week Vice President Joseph Biden is visiting Georgia, and in honor of being graced with his first high ranking visitor in quite a long time, President Mikheil Saakashvili has released an early copy of his speech to the Wall Street Journal, in which he intends to a new power-sharing agreement and an offer to make elections "more democratic."  Things in Georgia have been drifting in the wrong direction for quite a long time now since the ravages of the Russian invasion, with the Saakashvili administration firing some of the best and brightest individuals in the government, and grinding down the stable of advisers and ministers to only the most incompetant and blindly loyal.  The opposition, which is split between ...

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) may impose stricter limits on commodities speculators who are believed to be behind the main force behind wild swings in the futures markets over the past two years. The investigation has the support of politicians seeking greater price stability for the global economy and consumers, but traders argue that such restrictions will only reduce market liquidity and not necessarily prices.

CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler said his agency will hold a series of hearings from July through August to determine whether or not it should place new limits on energy futures contracts.

Right now, the CFTC sets limits on the amount of futures contracts in some agricultural products that can be held by market participants. But futures exchanges are free to determine what, if any, position limits should exist for energy futures.

The New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) currently restricts oil traders to 10,000 net futures

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by Edward Hugh: Barcelona br /br /Well reading the press this morning it would be fairly easy to reach the conclusion that nothing really happened yesterday in Brussels, and that a great opportunity was lost. The latter may finally be true, but the former most certainly is not. br /br /Let's look first at what was not decided on Sunday. The leaders of the 27 member countries in the European Union most certainly did not vote to back a proposal from Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany for a 180-billion-euro ($228 billion) aid package for central and eastern Europe. They did not back it because it was not even seriously on the agenda at this point. These people move slowly and we need to talk them throught one step at a time. So what was on the agenda. EU bonds for one, and a href="http://edwardhughtoo.blogspot.com/2009/02/let-east-into-eurozone-now.html"accelerated euro membership for the East for ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /br /Wolfgan Munchau a href=”http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c94ac804-fb62-11dd-bcad-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1″was complaining only last weekend/a about the extraordinary narrow-mindedness of Europe’s economic and political leadership in the face of the current financial and economic crisis, from Ireland in the West to Hungary in the East, and from Greece in the South to Sweden in the North. But more than narrow mindedness what we are faced with is innocence and inability to react, and frankly I am not sure which is worst. I say “innocence” because it is by now abundantly clear that they simply haven’t yet grasped the severity of the problems we face (in countries like Spain, or even Germany itself, let alone in the East), and I say inability to react, since they are always and forever moving too little and too late. The initial response to the banking crisis last October was one example (where we saw a …

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /blockquote"I would now expect several eurozone countries with weak banking sectors to get into serious difficulties as the crisis continues. There is a risk of cascading sovereign defaults. If this was limited to countries of the size of Ireland or Greece, one could solve this problem through a bail-out. But solvency risk is not a problem confined to small countries. The banking sectors in Italy, Spain and Germany are increasingly vulnerable."br /Wolfgang Munchau, a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c94ac804-fb62-11dd-bcad-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1"Financial Times/a, 15 February 2009./blockquoteblockquoteGerman Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNewsAndPR/idUSN1631373320090216"said on Monday/a euro zone countries would have to pull together if one of them faced a "serious situation," adding that Ireland was in a "difficult situation."br //blockquoteblockquoteInvestors are increasingly concerned that Ireland may default on its national debt as the government pledges more money to help troubled banks, the Sunday Times said. Credit-default swaps on Ireland’s government bonds reached record ...

I wanted to add an additional article that I found to the discussion of free-market capitalism and its role in the current economic crisis. This comes from Yaron Brook and Don Watkins via the a href="http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=index"Ayn Rand Institue/a. Ayn Rand is the author of classic novels such as Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem. br /br /br /strongStop Blaming Capitalism for Government Failuresbr /By /stronga href="http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_YaronBrook"strongYaron Brook/strong/astrong and /stronga href="http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_DonWatkins"strongDon Watkins/strong/abr /br /br /Speaking of the financial crisis, French president Nicolas Sarkozy recently said, “Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.”br /br /Sarkozy was echoing the views of many, including president-elect Obama, who assume that the financial crisis was caused by free markets--by “unbridled greed” unleashed by decades of deregulation and a “hands off” approach to the economy. And given this premise, the solution, they say, is obvious. To solve this crisis and ...

The G20 Summit was first proposed by the UK and France during the first waves of the global economic meltdown. It was long anticipated as a coming together of the major nations in the world to discuss necessary changes to help better regulate international finance, attempt to help stabilize the current turbulent markets, and discuss ways to have additional oversight on the international playing field.

After unprecedented global cooperation of bank bailouts and stimulus packages during the crisis, there was much debate about the outcome of the summit this past weekend. Unfortunately, world markets reflect a relatively negative viewpoint of the outcome– falling multiple percentage points in Europe (-2.4% UK, -3.35% Germany, -3.3% France), the Middle East (approx. -1.0% in Israel, Kenya, and Egypt, and 6% in Saudi Arabia), and mixed returns in Asia (+3/4% in Japan,

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