Most countries hold their reserves in dollars, which is a safe – haven of sorts, and that is why the dollar is known as the – reserve currency – of the world. To counter deflation’s bad effects, and to stimulate the economy – the US plans to spend billions of dollars over the next...
Facebook has raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) and Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, which implies that the social media darling is valued at a staggering $50 billion. This reminds me of the valuations being assigned to Internet companies leading up to the “dot.bomb” crash. There’s no way a...
Rare earths are a group of exotic elements of the Periodic Table (Lanthanides, mostly), with unique electrical, magnetic, optical and other properties. Without them there’s basically no clean tech, green tech, advanced electronics, electric cars, and much more. It’s not that rare earths are geologically “rare.” It’s more that they’re so darned hard to...
In her keynote speech on Monday, Nancy-Ann DeParle, Counselor to the President and Director of the White House Office of Health Reform, faced a hostile audience as she laid out the case for reform. The audience snickered when she pointed to the recent lower unemployment figures as proof that reform isn’t the job killer...
Just a few years ago, the energy investment idea du jour was to build liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals to handle future imports to the voracious US hydrocarbon market. Remember Cheniere Energy, once the darling of newsletter writers? Now there’s talk of re-tooling some of America’s LNG systems for the exportation of natural gas....
We call this technology the “Chi–Tab”… but in the U.S. it goes by a bunch of different names… Dell calls it the “Streak.” HP has their own version – the “Touchsmart.” Samsung has the Galaxy Tab. Apple of course has the iPad. There’s also the “Ideos” from a Chinese company called Huawei, and the...
The gold price soared nearly 30% last year – punctuating a spectacular decade-long run that has seen the gold price quintuple! So has gold finally reach a “bubble phase?” Is the great gold bull market on its last legs? In a word, No! If gold is in a bubble, then it’s one heck of...