The ever-positive Vladimir Putin is forecasting 8% inflation for the coming year, which would be a 'post-Soviet low'.  The government will sell tons of its gold stockpile this year to cover its budget deficit and help it fund other supporting measures such as Moscow's $570 million federal loan.  Private lender Alfa Bank is working on debt restructuring terms for giants BasEl and RusAl, and threatening to take the latter to court over unpaid debts.  St Petersburg Bank plans to raise up to $150 million selling additional preference shares to cope with its losses.  Reuters has compiled a timeline on Russia's bad loans.  'For all of the vaunted stability of the current regime, Russians still don't believe in the permanence of their system enough to invest into their society,' comments this reporter in a piece about ...

Its almost comical to see the big banks coming out of the woodwork with their opinions on how high gold is going to go now. If you are a trader (I am not) maybe that means its time for a little pullback. Certainly is alot of confidence oozing from this article. Gold, ‘Off The Charts’, May Target $1,500: Technical Analysis By Glenys Sim Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) — Investors should hold onto long positions in gold as bullion has “significant upside potential” to reach as high as $1,500 an ounce, Barclays Capital said, citing trading patterns. “Having rallied ‘off the charts’, we are left to resort to projections and extrapolated trendlines to forecast where the move might stop,” Jordan Kotick, global head of technical analysis at Barclays Capital, wrote in a note e-mailed today. So-called trendlines are used to determine momentum and are found ...

I think it says quite a lot about the freedom of press situation in Russia when a reporter is just as likely to face violence and threats for reporting about the past as they are for muckraking some contemporary politician for corruption, or another breaking news issue.  That's what is happening to the former dissident and political prisoner Alexander Podrabinek, who is getting threats of physical violence and scary Nashi-organized protests outside his apartment door (not the first time he's been targeted).  According to a story in the AP, Podrabinek provoked the ire of the nationalists when he criticized their campaign to have a restaurant change its name from "Anti-Soviet" to something more patriotic.  The article ...

In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we’ve paid bitterly for some of that. But now it’s our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.

It’s odd, that in his otherwise excellent blow-by-blow account (”Eight Days,” in the Sept 21 New Yorker Magazine) of the September 2008 Wall Street meltdown that left Lehman dead, and AIG croaking in a ditch, and the banking system in general functionally crippled, reporter James B. Stewart never got around to really describing the cause of it all — namely, the on-the-ground material catastrophe of American suburbia.

It was the worthlessness of the tradable securitized debt associated with all those overpriced (and overvalued) chipboard and vinyl houses, smeared recklessly over the American landscape, that started all the trouble in the first place. And it is our inability to come to

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Dollar continues to slide…  US GDP contracts but not as fast…  Nordic currencies outperform…  Japanese yen continues to fall… And Now… Today’s Pfennig! Good day… The last day of July is upon us. Time just seems to keep moving faster as it seems summer just got started. The fall of the dollar also accelerated yesterday as investors moved back out of the ’safe haven’ of US$ and continued to shop for more yield. The greenback tried to stage a bit of a rally in early European trading, but has fallen back off again as I sit down to write the Pfennig.

I got a call from a Reuters reporter yesterday mid morning to ask why the dollar was rallying at the same time stocks were moving higher. I quickly paged through my Bloomberg looking for some sign why both were heading higher. The trading pattern which has been established over the last few months has

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China turns it up another notch… now “concerned about the security” of U.S. investments… Chris Mayer tells the “story of today’s economy”… Mainstream celebrates latest home price index… our perceptive on the housing “recovery”… Three market sectors currently detached from reality… The truth emerges… why Ben Bernanke really bailed out Wall Street…

Here it comes, slowly but surely: “We sincerely hope the U.S. fiscal deficit will be reduced, year after year,” China’s Assistant Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said overnight after talks with Treasury Secretary Geithner. Could he lay it out any more clearly than this? “The Chinese government is a responsible government, and first and foremost our responsibility is the Chinese people, so of course we are concerned about the security of the Chinese assets.”

The Chinese now own over $801 billion in U.S. debt, nearly double their holdings at the start of 2007 and by far the world’s largest

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One of our local papers did a better job of reporting this issue than I have seen from any of the big guys, in part because the reporter started with the question that I think everyone should be asking: what does it mean to create a green job? Here's what I said:

If you have two people making the same amount of energy that one person used to make, would you want to describe that as creating one new job? I would say no, you're significantly reducing productivity. Ultimately, creating jobs has to do with promoting productivity.... We might well make a decision that we want to be promoting economic growth in a way that's more friendly toward the environment. That's a fine decision to make, but I don't think we ought to be doing it under the pretense we're creating jobs for people.

In the currency market, the dollar rose slightly against the euro. Late Tuesday, the euro was trading at $1.4199 vs. $1.4226 on Monday. Except for the yen, the dollar gained marginally on most of its major rivals yesterday.

“Since the start of the financial crisis of 2007 there has only been one trade across all the capital markets — risk on or risk off. As equities collapsed, the dollar and the yen gained while the euro, the pound and the Aussie along with oil and gold declined,” said Boris Schlossberg, director of currency research at GFT.

“As the recovery trade took hold the process has reversed and all the risk currencies have marched almost lock in step with equity prices,” Schlossberg added.

In economic news, Bernanke was back in front of Congress yesterday, spouting economic fallacy after fallacy that the news media eagerly lapped up and politicians grossly mis-analyzed.

The always-vocal Rep.

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An important indicator to watch, if you want a true picture of the economy, is railroad traffic. a href="http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109amp;sid=aPAQLQ0ebMQI"Warren Buffett also pays close attention to this/a.br /br /blockquoteBuffett follows this gauge more closely than any other index, Bianna Golodryga, a reporter for ABC’s “Good Morning America” program, said yesterday after she interviewed the billionaire investor. Its drop worries him, she reported./blockquotebr /br /Let's take a look at a href="http://www.aar.org/NewsAndEvents/PressReleases/2009/07_WTR/070909_Traffic.aspx"last weeks data/a:br /br /ulliThe Association American Railroads today reported that freight traffic on U.S. railroads continues to parallel the nation’s overall economic condition, as traffic remained down year over year for the week ended July 4, 2009. U.S railroads reported originating 241,240 cars, down 15.6 percent compared with the same week in 2008. Total volume on U.S. railroads for the week ending July 4 was estimated at 25.7 billion ton-miles, off 14.3 percent from the same week last year./liliRegionally, carloadings ...

In light of Barack Obama's visit to Russia, Forbes is publishing a number of new articles as part of a special report to remind everybody that the murder of their former employee, Paul Klebnikov, remains unsolved and politically stalled.  Here is just one from Nina Khrushcheva:

It is generally accepted that, in civilized countries, when a reporter loses his or her life it is while covering war or other armed conflicts. And when a businessman is jailed it is typically for proven acts of fraud. Not so in Russia, the country where Vladimir Putin once declared a "dictatorship of law," and where the current president, Dmitry Medvedev, reassuringly pledged a fight against "legal nihilism" not long after assuming office.

Out of the 250 journalists who have died in Russia since the end of communism, 150 were murdered covering normal, peacetime stories. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a businessman who

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