This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• OUPblog: Oxford Word of the Year 2009: Unfriend, November 16, 2009. Every year the New Oxford American Dictionary prepares for the holidays by making its biggest announcement of the year.  This announcement is usually applauded by some and derided by others and the ongoing conversation it sparks is always a lot of fun, so I encourage you to let us know what you think in the comments.

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: “unfriend”. “Unfriend” - verb - to remove someone as a “friend” on a social networking site such as Facebook.

• Martin Wolf (Financial Times): Grim truths Obama should have told Hu, November 17, 2009. Obama

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GWS Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: GWSC), an alternative energy company developing renewable energy solutions, announced today that it has partnered with Dominion Real Estate Investments LLC, (DREI) to begin development of a 118 acre solar farm in Lubbock Texas.

The project could provide power to a planned housing development and federal facilities contiguous to Lubbock Airport. The initial project was designed in conjunction with Texas Tech University. The estimated cost of the entire project is approximately $250 million.

“This is another great opportunity for us to take advantage of the many federal and state incentives offered for alternative energy projects,” said Michael Coskun, Vice President of GWS Technologies Inc. “We are very pleased to have the opportunity to team up with Dominion Real Estate Partners again.”

“One of our priorities this year is to incorporate as much "Green" technology as possible into our real estate investment strategies. We are fortunate to

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The jobless rate hit a 26-year high of 9.5% last month – and many economists are betting for the jobless rate to hit 10%.

“Of the June total,” reports the Labor Department, “1,235 mass layoffs were reported in the manufacturing sector.”

“All the indicators in the real economy,” said Bill Bonner in his final speech at the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver, “are actually getting worse.”

And is it any surprise? What exactly does America make anymore? We have been a nation of consumers for the past decade, spending and borrowing to buy the gee-gaws and gadgets that our friends in the Far East have been so busy producing. But now, consumers are saving…they aren’t buying flat-screen televisions…or new cars…or much of anything for that matter.

And it goes without saying that since the housing bubble has popped, the one sector that was actually producing – the building of residential

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GWS Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: GWSC), an alternative energy company developing renewable energy solutions, announced today that it has partnered with Dominion Real Estate Partners, Inc. (DREP) to provide solutions and technology integration on alternative energy projects in Texas and Arizona.

GWS will also supply solar panels and equipment to retrofit commercial buildings operated by DREP and assist the company in applying for certification under the Commercial/Industrial Solar Energy Tax Credit Program. The primary goal of this program is to stimulate the production and use of solar energy in commercial and industrial applications by subsidizing the initial cost of solar energy devices. Tax credits can be used to offset Arizona income tax liability; any unused credit amounts can be carried forward for a five-year period.

“These incentives are continuing to drive the demand for our business,” said Richard Reincke, President of GWS Technologies, Inc. “They are making solar installations economical, and

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I’m confident that the trend for REITs will be down through the end of 2009. That’s why I suggest buying the UltaShort Real Estate ProShares ETF (NYSE: SRS. Current price $18.52) as a way to profit from weakness in the REIT sector. But fasten your seatbelt! SRS will be volatile!

REITs may appear cheap, but they are very dangerous to hold right now. A basic tenet of corporate finance is that a company or a sector is only creating value for shareholders if its return on invested capital (ROIC) exceeds its weighted average cost of capital (WACC). If its WACC exceeds its ROIC, it is destroying value. This describes the situation facing the REIT sector for the next few years.

Most REITs cannot float unsecured debt at anything less than 10% or 12%, so their cost of capital is high and rising. At the same time, due to the

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I’m confident that the trend for REITs will be down through the end of 2009. That’s why I suggest buying the UltaShort Real Estate ProShares ETF (NYSE: SRS. Current price $18.52) as a way to profit from weakness in the REIT sector. But fasten your seatbelt! SRS will be volatile!

REITs may appear cheap, but they are very dangerous to hold right now. A basic tenet of corporate finance is that a company or a sector is only creating value for shareholders if its return on invested capital (ROIC) exceeds its weighted average cost of capital (WACC). If its WACC exceeds its ROIC, it is destroying value. This describes the situation facing the REIT sector for the next few years.

Most REITs cannot float unsecured debt at anything less than 10% or 12%, so their cost of capital is high and rising. At the same time, due to the

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Wherever we’re going, are we there yet? Nope! But we’re getting there. That is, America is sleepwalking its way into poverty. China is performing a kind of financial alchemy. And Australia finds itself subject to American-style problems, but benefitting from China’s Grand Economic Strategy.

But how about those powerful idealists on U.S. markets? Both the S&P 500 and the Dow were up nearly three percent. If you can believe it, they were led by financial stocks and retailers. Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) finished up 9.9% after Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) put it on its “conviction buy” list. Home hardware retailer Lowes was up 8.1% after a survey of U.S. homebuilder confidence surged.

By the way, what the hell is a “conviction buy” list? Does that mean you can only recommend stocks in which the executives have been convicted of a crime? And if it means a share you can buy with

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The fact that Hungary's National Bank did not decide to make an unexpected interest rate cut at its meeting earlier this week seems to have a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchiveamp;sid=a84zp9hh0af0"surprised some/a, but it really should not have done. According to James Morsink, head of the IMF delegation to Budapest, Hungary only has room to cut its benchmark interest rate a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchiveamp;sid=aW.6Yo1wzmp4"at a “gradual and cautious” pace/a. The reasoning behind this view is simple, any more rapid reduction in the bank's benchmark rate risks being accompanied by a devaluation of the forint, and and any such devaluation would inevitably lead to a rise in mortgage defaults and problems for the banking system as holders of Swiss Franc forex loans find themselves unable to maintain their payments as unemployment rises and wages and salaries fall.br /br /Thus it is that even though the Hungarian economy is now in its worst recession in over a decade ...

Monday November 24, 2008 Navivest

Citigroup (C) which seen its shares decimated along with just about every other stock, saw an acceleration of the decline in its shares last week, as Wall Street turned its negative focus on the company.

The shares traded as high as $10.11 exactly a week ago, but by Friday, they were down to $3.77 after hitting an intra-day low of $3.05.

With Citigroup being just about the largest bank in the world in terms of footprint, obviously no longer on a market cap basis, it was automatically assumed that the government would step in to help rebuild confidence in the company. And since as with other bank rescue plans, they’ve done it over the weekend before the markets opened on Monday, it was expected that we would get news this weekend with regards to Citigroup as well. They’ve delivered.

In an agreement between Citigroup, the U.S. Treasury,

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