TODAY: Lavrov keeps eagle eye on Georgia; Netanyahu's fears about Russian rogue scientists; Chubais takes the fall for hydropower plant disaster.  Litvinenko widow despairs over apparent British moves towards rapprochement.  Luzhkov-Baturina to take Nemtsov to court. UN report pessimistic on Russia's demographic decline; Ban Ki-moon voices approval for ecological care.According to the Moscow Times, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says that Russia will survey shipping in the Black Sea to monitor Georgian 'provocations' which are a 'serious concern'.  Jorg Himmelreich in the International Herald Tribune suggests that much analysis of last year's Georgia-Russia conflict has overlooked the crucial matter of President Bush's Georgia policy.  Spokesman Andrei Nesterenko says that he believes that the ratification of the Lisbon treaty would benefit ...

Recently, Harbinger Capital Partners, one of the largest investors in The New York Times Company (NYT), offloaded a chunk of its stake in the company. The investment firm sold about 5 million shares at $8.25 per share, fetching $41.3 million in total. This reduces its ownership interest to 16.38% from 19.94%. The shares of New York Times surpassed the selling price and closed at $8.37 on Tuesday, up 2.6% from the previous day’s session. Harbinger made it clear that it has no intention to shed its entire stake. Harbinger Capital started purchasing The New York Times shares nearly two years ago, at prices ranging between $15 and $20 a share, and investing approximately $500 million in aggregate. The firm incurred a significant loss by selling shares at $8.25 each. The investment firm was looking for a ...

The future cometh…Cash for bankers! Cash for Detroit’s clunkers! From one scam to the next…But first, let us turn to the latest market update.

The Dow rose again yesterday – up 33 points, to close at 9,320. We set 10,000+ as our objective for this bounce. We’ll stick with it for a while longer.

Make no mistake though. No one knows how long this rally will last – certainly no one here at the Daily Reckoning vacation headquarters. It will continue until it runs out of gas. That could be tomorrow. It could be months from now.

It will run out of gas sooner or later, and probably this fall. A real, durable bull market would require an economic boom – a genuine recovery. We don’t see that happening…

But people must think it is happening…

“There are signs of a recovery in the US… ” was a popular line at

...

Madrid, Spain

Two important headlines this morning, both of them fraudulent:

“Chinese economy bounces back,” says one headline in theInternational Herald Tribune.

“JPMorgan profit soars despite downturn,” says another.

The average reader or TV viewer will go no further. “Ah,” he says to himself, “good news; the worst is over. China is a green shoot as big as the Amazon. And JPMorgan is a leader in the financial sector. If the financial sector is doing well, the whole world economy must be doing well.”

But here at The Daily Reckoning, we can’t help ourselves. If we see a silver lining, we look for the cloud. We see garbage…we look for the rat…

We begin with the JPMorgan profit announcement, because it is the most intriguing. Let us set the stage:

In the last half century, credit has expanded faster even than dress sizes. Naturally, this has made the business of hawking credit

...

And it’s one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam; And it’s five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain’t no time to wonder why, Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.

– Country Joe & the Fish, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag”

Robert McNamara must have been in a hurry too. He never had time to wonder why he was sending 500,000 American boys to fight a war when Lyndon Johnson was “publicly promising in campaign speeches not to ‘go North,’ not to send American boys to fight wars Asian boys ought to fight for themselves,” as an editorial appearing in the June 17, 1971 issue of The Washington Post put it.

Both the International Herald Tribune and the Financial Times describe the former Secretary of Defense as the “architect” of the Vietnam War. This is news to

...

Bernie Madoff and his Finacial Crime.

Let the punishment fit the crime!

Poor Bernie. The man has been ordered to spend 150 years in the hoosegow. What for? Who did he kill? A century-and-a-half seems a little excessive for a financial crime. You could hold up three liquor stores and rape a whole convent and still not get 150 years. With a little good lawyering, a history of child abuse in the family and good behavior in the big house, you’d be back on the street in 18 months.

But all the papers seem delighted. “Locked up for Life!” says one of today’s headlines. The judge “threw the book at him,” says another. His victims wanted him to get no mercy. The judge gave him none, imposing the maximum sentence. He is “extraordinarily evil,” said the man on the bench.

Justice has been done. Right?

Here in the building with the gold balls, we’re not

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Christmas may be over, but Obama is keeping the ’season of giving’ going on the Hill…the next bubble will be in public debt… Stock prices are more ‘normal’ than they were a year ago…how many chickens can get in a plane engine? What is bad for GM is bad for America…just when you think you have things figured out, the facts change…and more!

After five straight days of losses, Wall Street managed to steady itself yesterday. The Dow rose only 12 measly points; but that was a relief for most investors.

Oil held steady too - at $35. And gold lost a dollar, to drop to $807.

The big question is a question of faith. How much faith do you have in the feds? They aim to get inflation fired up. They’ve got the fire-starters. They’ve got the matches. They’ve doused on the gasoline. But so far, the whole world economy is still

...

Give us Madoff! Give us Madoff!  “Oil rises to $39 on Bernanke comments…”  “Asian stocks rise after Bernanke remarks…” When they turned out the lights and closed the doors in New York last night, the Dow had lost 25 points and oil had gone down to $37. But this morning, investors seem to be feeling better about things. What did Bernanke say to bring about the turnaround?

We find the report on the front page of the International Herald Tribune:

“More capital injections and guarantees may become necessary to ensure stability and the normalization of credit markets,” said the main man at the Fed, speaking to an audience at the London School of Economics.

He went on to say that he didn’t necessarily like bailing out Wall Street, but it “appears unavoidable.”

Nothing particularly exciting about that. But then we turn to page 12:

“Bernanke warns that bigger bailouts needed around the world,” is the

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Back in mid-October, Samuel Charap and Andrew Kuchins published a thoughtful op/ed piece in the International Herald Tribune entitled "Russia's Peace Offensive," which argued that there were signs that Dmitry Medvedev was striving for a more cooperative tone during his speech at Evian, signaling the beginning of a campaign to thaw the recent freeze in relations with the West. Perhaps somewhat preemptively, the authors conclude "Now that the Russians have apparently realized that their national interests lie in greater cooperation, and not confrontation, with the West, it is time to reach out to the Russians." I have some nitpicking problems with this breezy reasoning about what Russia realizes and doesn't realize, but Charap and Kuchins were certainly right about one thing: the Kremlin would very much like to play good cop for a while to ease the reputational damage caused by the ...