TODAY: Medvedev the latest to criticize NATO exercises; perseverance required in nuclear talks; budget revenues may fall short; one million temporary jobs to be created; London's Speakers Corner 'cool' President Medvedev has spoken out against the NATO war games to take place in Georgia, calling the move 'the wrong decision'.  China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have engaged in military exercises for the first time since Kyrgyzstan said it would close down the Manas air base, the last U.S. air base in Central Asia.  At a conference for 'Overcoming Nuclear Dangers', Mikhail Gorbachev and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz have discussed their failed 1986 US-Russia Reykjavik summit and urged the new presidents to persevere when it comes to nuclear disarmament talks. ...

Gold started off early morning Far East trading on Wednesday as it usually does lately…going into a slow decline. And, as usual, at 3:00 a.m…shortly before the London open…the price began to rise, this time sharply. But it was all for naught once again, as someone was there to sell gold hard the moment that the London a.m. fix was in. The decline lasted for the rest of the London session…through the Comex open…and only reversed at the close of London trading at 4:00 p.m….11:00 a.m. New York time. However, this attempted rally was not allowed to amount to much, but gold did close the Globex session about eight dollars above its lows.

click to enlarge

Silver was far more volatile. The price rise at the London open was impressive until it, too, ran into the same seller at …

This a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008528983_icefish17.html?syndication=rss"article about the fishing industry/a in Iceland made its way into many newspapers yesterday. Apparently there is a boom in fishing, the Icelanders have not over-fished their waters and the weak ISK helps when they sell the fish abroad.br /br /Iceland will recover at some point although it may look different that it did. If you read anything about the ascendancy of Iceland that occurred you will invariably find a comment about Range Rovers driving through the streets of Reykjavik and having been there for a few days a couple of years ago I can tell you it is true; Range Rovers and BMWs aplenty. Or it was true anyway.br /br /While I don't know how they should do this I think they need to really push to draw in more things like data centers and certain types of manufacturing that would benefit from the geothermal energy. The ...

Tuesday was the third day in a row that gold and silver got sold off as soon as trading began in the Far East…and as I write this, Wednesday morning in Asia is shaping up the same way. Gold was down about $15 when the Comex opened in New York on Tuesday…and a ferocious $25 rally (tech funds?) got stopped dead in its tracks at precisely 9:00 a.m. Eastern time…the second day in a row it didn’t get past $830 the ounce. Silver’s fate was similar. Both sold off from there and both finished basically unchanged from Monday. The HUI traded as low as 218…but managed to tack a 5% gain onto that number to close in slightly positive territory for the day.

Monday’s open interest numbers were interesting. Gold open interest fell 5,533 contracts to 282,978…another new low. One would think that it should have gone up with the gold

...

Iceland today (Thursday) secured nearly $11 billion in loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other nations. The bailout will help the island nation stabilize its currency and recapitalize its banks, but it will also saddle its tiny population with a huge debt burden.

The IMF will lend Iceland $2.1 billion, and Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark will loan $2.5 billion to help the country re-float its currency and shore up its banking sector.

The Icelandic krona, or crown, has lost about 70% of its value since the nation’s financial crisis first began. The government put restrictions on currency trade as it wrestled with the crisis, however one of the stipulations of the IMF loan is that Reykjavik once again float its currency. Once it does, it’s likely that there will be a “massive currency outflow,” Iceland’s central bank said.

The krona, which traded at 176 against the euro

...

In my usual weekend reading routine I came across this article in the NY Times profiling the plight of several Icelanders including a coffee house owner in Iceland trying to keep her business, Kaffitar, afloat.One problem Kaffitar is having is getting suppliers to conduct business with it. At some point in the process someone has to buy Icelandic kronas to complete the transaction and no one is willing to do that.Another problem is that Kaffitar borrowed money in euros for expansion. The monthly payment used to be ISK 120 million but now it is ISK 200 million after the collapse of the currency. What would a 66% increase in your mortgage do to you? This is happening to many businesses in Iceland.When Joellyn and I were in Reykjavik in July 2006 there was a Kaffitar a couple ...

As the worst financial crisis in recorded market history rocks Wall Street, millions of investors on Main Street keep asking a single question. When will this end? The market volatility is unprecedented: Where professional traders once ranked a day as “wild” if we witnessed a 300-point swing, in recent months we’ve seen 600- and 700-point swings on a regular basis. On Oct. 9, a Thursday, we rode out a record-setting swing of 1,000 points. That wild backdrop is bad enough. At the same time, however, the major market indices are heading lower – at times with a speed and ferocity never before seen. But the real killer is that there is seemingly nowhere to hide. This is what Wall Street’s Armani Army doesn’t tell you about traditional diversification: It doesn’t work when everything goes down at once. (The one exception is the specialized inverse investment vehicles ...

See Pasko's first dispatch from Iceland here. Descendants of the Vikings or Political Correctness in Iceland Grigory Pasko, journalist Если Вы хотите прочитать оригинал данной статьи на русском языке, нажмите сюда. On 5 October of this year in Reykjavik one Icelandic newspaper took from me an interview. On that same day telejournalists also took an interview, having promised to put it on the air the next day. On the next day, the 6th, the interview came out in the paper, but was not shown on television. On that same day, the 6th of October, two more newspapers took interviews. And promised to publish them on the 7th. And on that same day, but later in time than when the interviews had taken place, it became known that Russia would supposedly allocate 4 billion euros to Iceland in the capacity ...

One of the biggest problems with the United States becoming a debtor nation instead of a creditor is that we really lose any ability to help out our valued friends in times of trouble. As such, the banking crisis in Iceland has forced the government to turn to Russia - who is happy to throw some of its excess liquidity toward the relatively stable instruments of the country in the form of a $5.4 billion loan. Reykjavik is really not all that happy about it, and seems to display some awareness that this is exactly the kind of deal that can end up outsourcing your Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Kremlin oversight just like Finland. Prime Minister Geir Haarde tells the Financial Times, "We have not received the kind of support that we were requesting from our friends. So in ...