Will current Bank of Israel head Stanley Fischer be leaving Israel for the New York Fed? According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Fischer is considered to be a dark horse to fill the vacancy left by Timothy Geithner, who is joining Pres. elect Barack Obama as Treasury Secretary.

According to the Journal, “Outsiders who could be considered include Peter Fisher, a former Treasury official who is now a senior executive at BlackRock Inc.; Stanley Fischer, an economist who runs Israel’s central bank; and Roger Ferguson, a former deputy Fed chairman who is now chief executive of TIAA-CREF, an investment firm that specializes in serving academic institutions.”

The question is whether if this is so, does this mean the Israeli economy is about to go into the gutter. Fischer has a history of bailing out just in the nick of

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If the new president looked a little, well, burdened on election night, chances are he’s aging a couple of years in the six-hour span between the release of unemployment figures this morning and his first news conference as president-elect this afternoon.

 

6.5% unemployment in October — worst since early Clintontime.  Worse still were the revisions of the August and September numbers.  And as Karl Denninger noticed, the number of unemployed plus the number of people working part-time who’d like to work full-time now tops 11%.  (And who knows what the real figure would turn out to be once John Williams applies Carter-era standards to the numbers.)

As I write, the president-elect is meeting with his “Transition Economic Advisory Board,” his temporary brain trust as it were.  The names on the panel are, well, interesting.  Some of the faces from I.O.U.S.A. are there.  But one has to wonder if

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Hedge Fund ActivismCorporations & Activist Hedge FundsThe Conference Board Working Group on Hedge Fund Activism has released its final recommendations for those corporations and institutional investors that may find themselves involved in an activism campaign mounted by hedge funds.The recommendations were formulated by a heterogeneous group of high-level corporate and investor representatives, instituted under the auspices of The Conference Board Governance Center. They include guidelines on monitoring securities holdings, responding to requests for change, ensuring voting integrity, and overseeing hedge fund management. Working Group members include:• Major pension funds and asset management firms, including TIAA-CREF, Florida State Board of Administration, and Barclays;• Corporations at the forefront of corporate governance developments, including Pfizer, American Express, and The Coca-Cola Company; and• Industry associations and service providers such as Managed Funds Association, the National Investor Relations Institute, ISS-RiskMetrics Group, Standard ...

Fuqi International (FUQI) is a designer and maker of precious metal jewelry in China. The company produces and sells rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and pendants made from precious metals, such as platinum, gold, palladium, and karat gold. Fuqi International also features products with diamonds and other precious stones. Last week, the company announced that it opened its first stores in China’s capital of Beijing along with one store opening in Shanghai, a major population center and tourist destination in China. The company now has a total of 60 stores in its home country of China.

For the third quarter, Fuqi International anticipates total wholesale revenue of approximately $75 million to $77 million, which would represent a year-over-year increase of approximately 108 percent to 114 percent, respectively. In addition, the company expects retail revenue in the third quarter of approximately $3.8 million to $4 million. Net income in the third quarter is

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Alex’s Notes: Wow are these guys nuts?

Let me see if I can sum this up.

1. A whole bunch of banks get stupid all at once, and create a whole industry of liar loans (the sub-prime mess) allowing people who never should have been given the debt to take out a half million dollar mortgage an go shopping

2. Those mortgages get packaged up nice and tidy and sold to Wall Street

3. Wall Street packages the garbage up and sells it to municipalities, foreign banks, and governments all over the world

4. A whole bunch of people default on their loans (wow, big surprise there)

5. Financial institutions all around the world start taking losses on their balance sheets and start crying uncle

6. The good old Fed steps in and bails out Bear Stearns, mostly because they were greedy and stupid, in early 2008, and YOU GET TO FOOT THE BILL.

7. More banks fail,

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It looks like a few more institutions have caught on to my thesis of farmland as fantastic investment opportunity, which I began proposing this winter [Jun 5: NYTimes: Farmland is Gold, So Billions Invested in Farming]. This is a sea change - hard assets having more value than stupid "financial innovations" of a debt laden, credit based society. We're going old school.If I had a way to buy futures contracts on farmland I'd be buying that too. And yes I am very serious. I think values for farmland across the world are going to rocket in the next decade.The way things are going, within a decade farmland is going to have more value than ocean front property.I've said in the past if there was an easy instrument to purchase farmland, I'd like to be in it. Even more ...