International stocks continue to gain popularity as investors look to align their portfolios with emerging market economies and creditor nations. Brazilian stocks have been at the top of the list, with the South American juggernaut being fueled by a pro-growth government, booming exports and the modernization of its infrastructure.

Pro-Growth Government

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, otherwise known as "Lula", has led the country's pro-growth strategy, appointing the market oriented economist and former CEO of Bank Boston Henrique Meirelles as head of the Brazilian Central Bank. Lula and his administration quickly strengthened the country's relationship with the IMF by renewing agreements and paying off its debt early.

Next up was the Growth Acceleration Program, an initiative designed to free the country's economy from growth constraints. By 2008 Brazil had became a creditor nation, with its debt recently getting the nod from Standard & Poors

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Brooklyn could soon have itself a new Russian billionaire patron, as Mikhail Prokhorov has reportedly made an offer to own the New Jersey Nets, helping real estate developer Bruce Ratner with a $700 million bond to move the team and build a new arena in the New York City borough.Prokhorov, who has been developing an increasingly well known public profile as a Russian Richard Branson (see him jump his jet ski here), announced the news on his blog.  In one translation of his statement, Prokhorov says he is interested in bringing the "technology" of the NBA business model back to Russia, to build a sustainable and profitable professional league, and to give Russia a rightful place in the world of elite U.S. sports.This move will put Prokhorov right up there next to Chelsea-owner Roman ...

Alabama regional lender, Colonial Bank, just became the 6th largest bank failure in U.S. history and the largest since Washington Mutual last year.

Regulators seized Colonial last Friday, selling the bank’s deposits and assets to their competitor BB&T. Colonial was founded by real estate developer, Robert E. Lowder in 1981. The bank stayed true to its roots, right to the end (of the housing bubble).

In a 2006 interview, Lowder said, “We’ve always been a real estate bank. We understand real estate lending. For us, we think it’s a good safe market to be in.” Evidently, they didn’t understand the market as well as they thought. The bank sunk under the weight of $1.7 billion in losses on bad real estate loans.

The real question regarding the failure of Colonial, is what this will do to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) maintained by the FDIC.

The FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund started 2008

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Risk aversion has left the building…  CIT survives without Fed help…  SNB tries to fight the markets…  Light week for US data… And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Good day… We had just an amazing weekend of weather here in St. Louis, and this morning is shaping up to be another beautiful day. Friday turned out to be a beautiful day for those who have taken our advice and diversified their holdings out of the dollar. Risk aversion was placed on the back burner again, and investors moved money back out of the dollar into higher yielding currencies. The dollar and yen got sold but all other currencies rallied, and investors also turned back toward gold pushing the metal above $950 for the first time in over a month.

So what caused all of this confidence? First, the housing data released Friday morning in the US showed a slight pick up in both building permits and housing starts.

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Simon Property Group, Inc. (SPG), the largest publicly traded retail real estate company in North America, has recently opened a premium outlet in Japan. The outlet has been developed by a JV called Chelsea Japan Co. Ltd., in which Simon Property has 40% stake. The remaining 60% of the JV is owned by Mitsubishi Estate Co. Ltd., the second largest real estate developer in Japan.

Currently only Phase I of the outlet, known as Ami Premium Outlet, spanning 225,000 square feet of gross leasable area, has been opened to the general public. Ami Premium Outlet is the eighth outlet of the JV in Japan, the others being Gotemba Premium Outlets and Sano Premium Outlets (both serving Tokyo), Rinku Premium Outlets (Osaka), Kobe-Sanda Premium Outlets (Kobe-Osaka), Sendai-Izumi Premium Outlets (Sendai), Toki Premium Outlets (Nagoya) and Tosu Premium Outlets (Fukuoka).

Ami Premium Outlet is strategically located in the close proximity of Ami-Higashi interchange

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A short piece in this week’s Economist focuses on the Gulf’s “nascent” bond market, which comprise only 3% of the world’s capital markets (debt in general makes up one-third). Global sukuk sales halved last year and were pretty moribund in the first quarter of 2009. That said, recent activity suggests not only resilience, but the seeds of a long-term trend that will grow into liquid secondary trading and provide a benchmark for private sector firms. For instance, PLUS Expressways Bhd., Malaysia’s biggest toll road operator, sold 600 million ringgit ($171 million) of Islamic bonds due May 2023 last week in order to repay maturing debt. A week earlier, Aldar Properties, Abu Dhabi’s largest developer sold $1.25 billion of 5-year notes, becoming the first UAE real-estate developer to issue debt after prices tumbled. Concurrently, Dubai Islamic Bank, the emirate’s biggest bank, announced a

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Notes from the Investment Underground Friday, March 20, 2008 Portland, Oregon, USA

Foreigners gang up on the dollar… Ben’s bitter irony… A chartist’s view on the buck… Why the Fed’s “quantitative easing” is a game changer… Investing in the “poor man’s gold”… And more!..

[Your Notes editor will be spending the day in battling Argentine bureaucracy. (It’s a long story. But basically I am trying to get residency down here.) So, today I’ll be leaving you in the capable hands of Crisis Strategy Alert senior analyst Charles Delvalle.]

*** Is this the end of the buck?

Next week a UN panel will recommend that the world drop the US dollar as the reserve currency and instead use a shared basket of currencies.

This from Reuters:

Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters ...

Emaar Properties PJSC, the largest real-estate developer in the United Arab Emirates, reported a fourth-quarter loss and put new real-estate projects on hold. The net loss was 1.77 billion dirhams ($481 million) compared with a profit of 1.74 billion dirhams a year earlier. The fell a further 8 percent bringing the decline in 2009 to 19 percent, following an 85 percent last year.

Controversy surrounding the Romanian economy is nothing new, nor, as a href="http://globaleconomydoesmatter.blogspot.com/2008/11/romania-votes-under-new-electoral.html"Manuel points out in his post on the recent election/a, are Romanian politics strangers to tumult. Nonetheless the intensity of controversy has grown considerably of late, with a wide variety of assessments being offered concerning the likely impact of the intensifying international credit crisis on the short to medium term outlook for the Romanian economy. National Bank of Romania (NBR) governor, Mugur Isarescu, has been consistently arguing that the country should be able to avoid an excessively "hard landing"as the bank attempts to cool its evidently overheated economy and engages of fire-extinguising activities in the banking sector trying to control the impact of set of adverse external circumstances that are largely beyond its control. But most of these comments (or at least the more convincing ones) preceded the meltdown in the international financial markets which followed the Lehman Brothers ...

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /Controversy surrounding the Romanian economy is nothing new, nor, as a href="http://globaleconomydoesmatter.blogspot.com/2008/11/romania-votes-under-new-electoral.html"Manuel points out in his post on the recent election/a, are Romanian politics strangers to tumult. Nonetheless the intensity of controversy has grown considerably of late, with a wide variety of assessments being offered concerning the likely impact of the intensifying international credit crisis on the short to medium term outlook for the Romanian economy.National Bank of Romania (NBR) governor, Mugur Isarescu, has been consistently arguing that the country should be able to avoid an excessively "hard landing"as the bank attempts to cool its evidently overheated economy and engages of fire-extinguising activities in the banking sector trying to control the impact of set of adverse external circumstances that are largely beyond its control. But most of these comments (or at least the more convincing ones) preceded the meltdown in the international financial markets which ...