I’m writing this from a hotel room in Santa Monica in California. I’m on holiday here with my lovely wife Lynn and our two equally gorgeous daughters, Eilish and Maddie, and am about to embark on an RV trip across America to Orlando in Florida.

Lynn will attend a conference on digital scrapbooking at Disneyland in Orlando in a fortnight if we make it. I’ll tell her story about how she came to be a digital design exporter (earning a lot more than me…) in this blog at a later date.  Suffice to say, this trip will more than pay for itself in US dollar earnings.

I’ll try to blog about the trip and what I learn from an economic and business point of view as often as I can. It should turn out a lot easier to do than in New Zealand. Free cable broadband or WiFi access

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EDF Scooping Constellation; Research in Motion Posts Tough 3Q; Legg Mason’s Miller Calls Market Bottom; Cyber Monday Sales Strong; Crude Stocks Drop; New Zealand Fights Recession

The world’s biggest nuclear utility company, Electricité de France SA will offer as much as $6.5 billion for assets of Constellation Energy Group, Inc (CEG), source familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. A previous offer by EDF was turned down, with Constellation opting for a $4.7 billion bid from Warren Buffett’s MidAmerican unit of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.A,BRK.B). Research In Motion Ltd.’s (RIMM) third-quarter subscriptions and profit fell short of forecasts, as it simultaneously faces increased competition and recession in its largest market. Profit for the Blackberry maker rose no more than 83 cents a share in the quarter ended Nov. ...

This wonderful mashup of polling booth results in Wellington and Google maps by the wellingtonista and some excellent statistics released today by the State Services Commission on staff numbers and salaries make for some interesting reading.Have a good look through these statistics. They show a few things.

First, this report should have been publicised last Friday, not a week after the election.

Second, it shows the Labour-led government’s line that public servant numbers were increasing at the coal face rather than in the office blocks of Wellington was simply wrong.

Numbers at the front line in the core public service, which includes social, health and education workers and contact centre workers, actually fell by 29 to 10,034 in the last year, while numbers of administrative, policy advice, HR, legal, managerial and support staff rose 1628 to 35,900.

So it’s not too surprising which way those

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I love Wellington. Really, I do. It’s where I met my lovely wife and where I’d live if I had a pure, unimpeded choice. Great people. Amazing landscape. Compact city. Great arts. Wonderful cafes such as my favourite, Midnight Espresso on Cuba St. It’s got it all. In fact, it’s got too much.

Wellington has become utterly dominated and powered by the most rapacious government in the history of New Zealand. This is not something I’m saying lightly or for the first time, although this is the most direct I’ve been.

Wellington has become a living, wheezing symbol of an economy where an all-consuming government is gobbling up resources and dragging down productivity in such a way as to transfer wealth and income from private employees and businesses to government employees while kneecapping economic growth.

This current government is eating the economy and it needs to be stopped

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I argued for bank deposit insurance scheme bank in March and at the beginning of last week. But I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t encouraged the politicians to get busy because this deposit guarantee scheme dumped on us is an unholy and dangerous mess.

I realise things had to be done in a hurry because Australia was about to announce its own deposit guarantee scheme and all hell was breaking loose on global markets, but the scheme proposed by Prime Minister Helen Clark in her re-election campaign launch on Sunday is a dogs breakfast. It  must be cleaned up before it putrifies into something so ugly and painful it could:

* Kill the stock market stone dead.

* Trigger a massive shift of cash from managed equity funds and corporate bonds to banks.

* Unleash a new generation of toxic finance companies.

* Vastly increase the cost of government borrowing.

* Mean deposit rates are all the same, or to be regulated to the same level, regardless of

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Headquartered in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, Granite City Food & Brewery Ltd. is an upscale, modern, and casual restaurant chain. Trading on the NASDAQ Global Market, the Company features affordable, high quality, family favorite menu items. In addition to food, they also have their own on-site brewery in each location. Founded in 1997, Granite City has a current market capitalization of $8.10 million.

The Company opened their first restaurant in St. Cloud, Minnesota in 1999. From there, they proceeded to open their next restaurant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in December of 2000. Next in line was their Fargo, North Dakota location, which opened in November of 2001. Today, Granite City Food & Brewery Ltd. operates 25 restaurants in eleven Midwestern states.

The Company’s focus is on made-from-scratch recipes, which they serve to their patrons in generous portions. They also serve handcrafted beers in the moderate price point range. They produce unique

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The markets are truly scary right now. Global credit has all but frozen. Stocks around the world are tumbling. And to make matters worse, governments and central banks are trying to 'fix' the problem with massive interventions.

But for investors with "a clear head and a keen eye for opportunity" boldness can pay big dividends.

Taipan Daily editor Justice Litle says there are five proven strategies for building wealth... regardless of whether the bulls or the bears are in charge. 

One of the more important lessons from the initial US$700 billion bailout rejection in the House of Representatives last week was that the business community doesn’t have unlimited goodwill.

When business people abuse their goodwill, as Wall Street executives have with the American public, then the consequences can be severe.

Telecom, under the stewardship of Chairman Sir Roderick Deane, abused its goodwill with New Zealand politicians and shareholders are now paying a huge price.

Contact Energy, which has its head in the sand as far as shareholders and politicians are concerned, could be heading in the same direction.

The problem with Contact Energy is that it is almost totally insensitive to the interest of outside parties.

The company continues to have Phil Pryke and Tim Saunders on its board when a majority of shareholders do not appear to want them.

Saunders was only re-elected as an independent director at last year’s annual meeting because of the

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Link FestHedge Fund Link FestIn case you have been reading up on bank failures and bail outs all week and missed much of the news on the hedge fund industry here is a link fest out to many of the events which recently occurred in the industry:Citadel, TPG-Axon Stumble Toward Worst Year in Hedge-Fund SwoonBloomberg - USA19, the worst first nine months of a year since Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc. started tracking the data in 1990. Investment gains are being ... Worth Interviews Hedge Fund Guru David EinhornMarketWatch - USAIn the case of Lehman Brothers, one of those short sellers is David Einhorn, the head of hedge fund Greenlight Capital. Last May Einhorn stated publicly ... ...

The last two weeks have been the most shocking in my time reporting on global financial markets. I started working for Reuters as a financial markets reporter back in 1992 in Wellington. In the following 14 years I  covered markets, companies and economics in Wellington, Canberra, Sydney, London and Singapore. I was up to my elbows in massive bank takeovers, market booms, dotcom busts and the aftermath of 9/11 when I worked in London for Reuters and FTMarketWatch from early 1999 to mid 2003. I had thought that was as wild as you could get. In Singapore I edited coverage of the SARS crisis throughout Asia and amazing rise of China’s economy and companies. I couldn’t imagine much bigger events or more amazing changes on markets. How wrong I was. These last two weeks make all those things look like mere blips and flurries. Could anyone have imagined two weeks ago that;

The US Treasury and ...