Steven Thorpe

• Mr. Prechter is convinced that we have entered a market decline of staggering proportions — perhaps the biggest of the last 300 years.
• “I’m saying: ‘Winter is coming. Buy a coat,’ ” he said. “Other people are advising people to stay naked. If I’m wrong, you’re not hurt. If they’re wrong, you’re dead. It’s pretty benign advice to opt for safety for a while.”
• His advice: individual investors should move completely out of the market and hold cash and cash equivalents, like Treasury bills, for years to come. (For traders with a fair amount of skill and willingness to embrace risk, he suggests other alternatives, like shorting the market or making bets on volatility.) But ultimately, “the decline will lead to one of the best investment opportunities ever,” he said.
• For a rough parallel, he said, go all the way back to England and the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, a crash that deterred people “from buying stocks for 100 years,” he said. This time, he said, “If I’m right, it will be such a shock that people will be telling their grandkids many years from now, ‘Don’t touch stocks.’ ”
• He has far less day-to-day influence now, after years spent developing a theory he calls “socionomics,” which holds “social moods” as the cause not only of market cycles but also of economic and political events. A grand cycle is ending, he says, and the time for reckoning is near.
• In 2002, he published “Conquer the Crash,” which predicted misery ahead. Even so, he said in 2008 that the market would soon rally sharply — then said late last year that stocks were about to fall and that the great decline would resume.

Read the whole article – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/your-money/04stra.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all

This handout photo provided by the South Korean Blue House shows an illustration of nuclear power plants to be built by a South Korea-led consortium in Sila, 330 kilometres (204 miles) west of the United Arab Emirates capital. The consortium won a 20-billion-USD contract to build four nuclear power plants in the Middle East country.

(AFP/Pool/Blue House)

Atlanta – The oft-cited credo that more guns equal more crime is being tested by facts on the ground this year: Even as gun ownership has surged in the US in the past year, violent crime, including murder and robbery, has dropped steeply. Add to that the fact that many experts had predicted higher crime rates as the US grinds through a difficult recession, and the discrepancy has advocates on both sides of the Second Amendment debate rushing to their ramparts. After several years of crime rates holding relatively steady, the FBI is reporting that violent crimes – including gun crimes – dropped dramatically in the first six months of 2009, with murder down 10 percent across the US as a whole. Concurrently, the FBI reports that gun sales – especially of assault-style rifles and handguns, two main targets of gun-control groups – are up at least 12 percent nationally since the election of President Obama, a dramatic run on guns prompted in part by so-far-unwarranted fears that Democrats in Congress and the White House will curtail gun rights and carve apart the Second Amendment. Pro-gun groups jumped at the FBI report, saying it disproves a long-running theory posited by gun-control groups and many in the mainstream media that gun ownership spawns crime and violence. “Anti-gunners have lost another one of their baseless arguments,” Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, told the Examiner’s Dave Workman.

Continue reading – http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20091223/ts_csm/270518

The French ruling party of President Nicolas Sarkozy now affirms it will present a bill to ban full-length Islamic veils in all public places in France. It won’t wait for the results of a parliamentary inquiry into the all-covering niqab and burqa to be published. The move adds fuel to an increasingly hot debate on French identity that has minorities here upset.

A nationwide identity debate, engineered by the ruling UMP party last month, has evolved into an embarrassingly unruly discussion about Muslims and northern Africans in France. And it comes on the heels of a surprise vote in neighboring Switzerland last month to outlaw the construction of new minarets at Muslim worship sites.

The UMP effort to outlaw the full-length veil in public trumps earlier efforts to ban it only in some official buildings, and comes at a time when French Muslims say they are being targeted as outsiders or not fully French.

Yet UMP party leader Jean-François Cope yesterday said veils that cover a woman’s entire face are a “violation of individual liberty” and a “negation” of one’s identity and that of others in a public milieu.

Under the proposed law, women would not be able to move in public with their faces fully covered. The legal rendering is that burqas and all-covering niqabs are a public order issue, and not a religious practice issue – as is the French ban on headscarves in schools, which has been carried out to uphold French secularism, known as laïcité.

Offenders wearing veils would receive a fine – though lawmakers now say there will be a period of mediation following the initial charge.

Continue reading – http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2009/1223/No-burqas-in-France-Ruling-party-moves-to-ban-veils-in-public

Israel will soon become the first country in the world to give people who agree to become organ donors priority treatment if they should require an organ transplant themselves.

Officials hope the incentive will increase the supply of available organs — of which there is a shortage across the world, but especially in Israel, where only one in 10 adults carries a donor card.

This is sure to be a closely watched change, as most countries have tried different measures to increase willingness to donate organs. Here’s a rundown of some of those efforts, which include (1) creating markets for organs; (2) making all citizens organ donors by default, unless they explicitly exempt themselves; and (3) investing in more health care infrastructure.

Some countries have proposed legalizing the sale of some organs for money, as is the case in Iran. But such policies are controversial, and not just because people have moral qualms about putting a price tag on an item as precious as a healthy kidney. Some scholars have written about the fear of “crowding out” altruistic motives for donating organs.

Continue reading – http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/how-can-we-encourage-organ-donation/

It would make a perfect Christmas gift!

LONDON (AFP) – Two common forms of cancer have been genetically mapped for the first time, British scientists announced, in a major breakthrough in understanding the diseases.

The maps have exposed the DNA mutations that lead to skin and lung cancers, in a discovery scientists said could transform the way these diseases are diagnosed and treated in coming years.

All cancers are caused by damage to genes — mutations in DNA — that can be triggered by environmental factors such as tobacco smoke, harmful chemicals or ultraviolet radiation, and causes cells to grow out of control.

Scientists from Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and their collaborators have mapped this genetic damage from the tumours of two patients suffering from lung cancer and malignant melanoma, a deadly skin cancer.

“This is a fundamental moment in cancer research. From here on in we will think about cancers in a very different way,” said Professor Mike Stratton who led the institute’s cancer genome project.

“Today for the first time, in two individual cancers, a melanoma and a lung cancer, we have provided the complete list of abnormalities in DNA in each of those two cancers,” he told the BBC.

“We now see uncovered all the forces that have generated that cancer and we now see all the genes that are responsible for driving those two cancers.”

Continue reading – http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091217/wl_uk_afp/healthcancerbritain_20091217020739

PARIS (AFP) – France will follow Britain and slap a 50 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses above 27,500 euros (40,000 dollars), Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said Wednesday.

Lagarde told reporters after a cabinet meeting that a bill detailing the new tax would be presented to parliament in January.

“The banks will see their bonuses of more than 27,500 euros taxed in 2010 and it will be a 50 percent tax,” she said.

Britain announced the new tax last Wednesday, arguing that it would help recoup cash spent rescuing the financial sector after the 2008 financial meltdown.

The British move came amid public fury over a decision by 70 percent government-owned Royal Bank of Scotland to award some 1.5 billion pounds in bonuses for senior staff.

Continue reading - http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091216/ts_afp/francebritainfinancebankingregulate_20091216121119

SYDNEY (AFP) – Australia said Tuesday it would push ahead with a mandatory China-style plan to filter the Internet, despite widespread criticism that it will strangle free speech and is doomed to fail.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said new laws would be introduced to ban access to “refused classification” (RC) sites featuring criminal content such as child sex abuse, bestiality, rape and detailed drug use.

Blacklisted sites would be determined by an independent classification body via a “public complaint” process, said Conroy, admitting there was “no silver bullet solution to cyber-safety”.

Internet user groups, the pornography industry and others have strongly opposed the plan, saying any such measure would be impractical to enforce, block access to some legitimate websites and slow down Internet speeds.

But Conroy said a seven-month trial had concluded that blocking could be done with 100 percent accuracy and negligible impact to connection speeds.

Internet service providers (ISPs) would be offered grants to offer additional filters of, for example, X-rated content and gambling sites, but Conroy said that would not be compulsory.

“Through a combination of additional resources for education and awareness, mandatory Internet filtering of RC-rated content, and optional ISP-level filtering, we have a package that balances safety for families and the benefits of the digital revolution,” he said.

Continue reading – http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091215/wl_asia_afp/australiainternettechnologycensorship_20091215082128

It’s generally known that men are hard-wired to be bigger risk takers than women (due to all that extra testosterone they have sloshing around). Interestingly, though, in a profession that is all about risk — hedge fund manager — testosterone may not be such a good thing. A new study by Hedge Fund Research found that, from January 2000 through May 31, 2009, hedge funds run by women delivered nearly double the investment performance of those managed by men. Female managers produced average annual returns of 9%, versus 5.82% for men. Not only that, in 2008, when financial markets were cratering, funds run by women were down 9.6%, compared to a 19% decline for men.

Continue reading – http://www.businessweek.com/careers/workingparents/blog/archives/2009/12/its_generally_k.html