The superstorm expected to develop from Hurricane Sandy probably will mean that millions of people lose power for a week as airplanes are grounded and coastal areas are flooded by tidal surge and rain.Enlarge image
Blustery winds blow through the palm trees as the outerbands of Hurricane Sandy are felt on Oct. 24, 2012 in Miami, Florida. Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
4:04Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Nick Ernst, evolution director of Weather Markets, talks with Bloomberg's Erik Schatzker and Sara Eisen about how to make money off of weather as Hurricane Sandy approaches the east coast of the United States. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "Market Makers."
4:25Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Elliot Warren, head energy options trader at Kottke, and Arthur Steinmetz, CIO at Oppenheimer Funds, discusses what impacts Hurricane Sandy could have on the energy markets. They speaks on Bloomberg Television's "Lunch Money."
2:11Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The superstorm forecast to develop from Hurricane Sandy will probably bring high winds to a large area of the U.S. Northeast and may end up knocking electricity out for days. Su Keenan reports on Bloomberg Television's "Money Moves." (Source: Bloomberg)
5:08Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg discusses hurricane preparation. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart." (Source: Bloomberg)Attachment: Billion Dollar U.S. Weather DisastersThe system, dubbed “Frankenstorm” by the National Weather Service, will grow out of Sandy and two other storms rushing eastward across the U.S., said Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather Inc. in State College,Pennsylvania. As many as 40 people were killed when Sandy crossed the Caribbean, the Associated Press reported.As many as 45,000 National Guard and Air Force personnel in seven states have been alerted that they may be called to duty, according to George Little, a spokesman for the Defense Department in Washington.“Because of the large size of the system and the slow motion, it’s going to be a long-lasting event, two to three days of impacts for a lot of people,” said James Franklin, branch chief at the National Hurricane Center. “The kinds of things we are looking at ultimately would be wind damage, widespread power outages, heavy rainfall, inland flooding and again, somebody is going to get a significant surge event out of this.”
Giant Storm
Sandy is expected to be so large it will cover the eastern third of the U.S., said Louis Uccellini, director of the National Centers for Environmental Protection in College Park, Maryland. The storm’s reach may extend into southern Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces, according to a bulletin from Environment Canada.Uccellini said he didn’t want to predict where Sandy, which now has a 90 percent chance of striking the U.S., will rank in terms of the largest storms to strike the Northeast until he sees how it actually develops.Yesterday, Paul Kocin, a National Weather Service meteorologist in College Park, said if Sandy grows as expected, it may be the worst storm to hit the region in 100 years.“What we’re seeing in some of our models is a storm at an intensity that we have not seen in this part of the country in the past century,” Kocin said in a telephone interview. “We’re not trying to hype it, this is what we’re seeing in some of our models. It may come in weaker.”As of 8 p.m. New York time, Sandy’s top winds were 75 miles (121 kilometers) per hour, down from 100 mph earlier, according to the hurricane center in Miami. It was 75 miles north of Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas and 400 miles south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, moving north at 7 mph.Forecast Track
The center’s current track for the system has it going ashore just south of the Delaware Bay late Oct. 29 or early Oct. 30 and moving northwest toward Baltimore. The path may change before landfall, the center said.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-26/widespread-power-outages-likely-as-sandy-slams-into-east.htmlAnd more layoffs.UBS Said to Plan 10,000 Job Cuts, Investment Bank Shrinks
UBS AG (UBSN), Switzerland’s largest bank, will cut as many as 10,000 jobs companywide as the trading business shrinks, a person with knowledge of the plan said.Enlarge image
A tram passes the headquarters of UBS AG bank in Zurich, Switzerland. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/BloombergEnlarge image
The UBS AG logo sits on the wall of the company's headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. Photographer: Gianluca Colla/BloombergEnlarge image
Carsten Kengeter, co-chief executive officer of UBS AG's investment bank, speaks during the Asean Finance Ministers Investors Seminar in Hong Kong. Photographer: Jerome Favre/BloombergMany of the reductions will come in the trading businesses overseen by investment-bank co-head Carsten Kengeter and probably will occur over several quarters, said the person, who requested anonymity because the plans haven’t been publicly announced. An announcement may come when UBS reports third- quarter earnings Oct. 30, the person said.Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti, 52, is overhauling the bank as Swiss regulators pressure UBS and Credit Suisse Group AG to boost capital and scale back trading and investment- banking operations. Like rival securities firms, UBS has been struggling to boost profitability as client activity and trading remain sluggish.“It was a loser’s game for them,” said Terry Connelly, former dean of the Ageno School of Business at Golden Gate University in San Francisco and an ex-managing director at Salomon Brothers Inc. “It wasn’t their fault, they simply tried climbing the wrong mountain.” High fixed costs and weak demand have made it harder to be profitable, and the industry will have to shrink more, he said.‘Paradigm Shift’
Ermotti told his staff in a memo this month he’ll do whatever it takes “to tackle the current challenging market environment and paradigm shift” in banking and will continue “remodeling” UBS. He said in July that the market environment has completely changed since the firm announced reorganization plans for the securities unit in November.“UBS is a microcosm for the industry,” Mark Williams, a lecturer at Boston University’s School of Management, said in an interview. “The banking business model is changing and we’ve got to look at cost structure, we’ve got to look at compensation, and we’ve got to readjust.”http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-26/ubs-said-to-plan-10-000-job-cuts-amid-investment-bank-shrinkage.htmlOn the use of gold coins as moneyHugo Salinas Price
Why don’t humans use gold coins as Money?
The answer is quite simple: because they don’t want to, under present circumstances.
The attachment of humans to gold is remarkable; I suspect there is something metaphysical about gold that attracts human beings. Perhaps gold is part of the natural order of things, part of the Rerum Natura, and the relationship of humans to gold is “built-in” into human nature, like sexual attraction. I won’t insist upon this, but I think about it.
But getting back to the question and the answer I give. The next question is: Why don’t humans choose to use gold coins as money, under the present circumstances?
The answer is equally simple: because we humans value gold so highly (the most significant material gift a man can give a woman he loves is gold in some form) we will use anything else available to make a payment, rather than part with gold.
If you have dollars, you will use dollars instead of gold. If you have euros, you will use euros instead of gold. British pounds, Russian rubles, Chinese yuan, Japanese Yen, and even that unlikely monetary unit, the Zambian kwatcha, any one of these will be used for payments rather than giving up a gold coin.
I read that the Swiss are thinking about allowing gold to have a monetary role. Someone has quipped that this is like wanting to re-hydrate water. The Swiss will achieve exactly nothing with this measure. Do they want to use gold as money? For that to happen, there would have to be no other currency available to the Swiss.
Gold will once again be used as money (it actually is money) when nobody will take anything else in payment or when there isn’t anything but gold (or silver) available with which to make payments. That was the situation back in the 19th Century and before. Gold was used because there was no alternative but silver, and that situation would have continued except for the fact that the ratio of silver to gold was a fixed ratio, and was not allowed to fluctuate with the market.
When the present fiat-money madness in the world has run its course, when no paper of any country can pay for its imports, then imports will be paid in gold. It may be a long wait.
I should add: if people were able to use 100% gold-backed redeemable banknotes as money, people would use those banknotes for payments rather than their gold coins. And they would use fiat-money banknotes for payments rather than tendering their gold-backed redeemable banknotes.
The gold coin beats the gold banknote because a gold coin is a tangible fact but a redeemable banknote is a promise, and a promise can never be equal to a fact, in the eyes of any human. This is why women like engagement rings.
If the ancient representation of gold has always been the Golden Sun, the equally ancient representation of silver has been the Moon, the Silvery Moon.
For practical purposes, we can state that silver has always been the money of the people. It is a precious metal, but it does not enjoy the high regard of gold.
People naturally save silver coins; they will do so all the more if the coins are given monetary status. Mexicans used the silver peso in parallel with paper money until 1946 because they had no alternative: the one-peso banknote did not exist until 1946. Americans used silver half-dollars, quarters and dimes until 1965 because they too, did not have any alternative; in 1965, the rise in the price of silver forced that coinage out of circulation and coins of base metal took their place. In our inflationary times the tendency will be to use paper money for daily transactions and save the monetized silver coins; only rarely will they be used in commerce.
http://www.plata.com.mx/mplata/articulos/articlesFilt.asp?fiidarticulo=196
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