Obama asked Asia last week to adjust its lifestyle such that the US doesn’t have to alter its own. As public anger at him painting a false rosy picture becomes palpable, the financial environment is once again showing signs of some unease. Turf wars being fought on issues such as breaking-up the big boys into smaller entities, segregating investments and banking, and taxing financial transactions are becoming intense.

The US insists a tax on financial transactions will have to be global but doesn’t want a global mechanism for interest or exchange rates. It doesn’t want to bring Glass-Steagall back. It doesn’t want to admit that it has gone too far in insuring and hedging anything and everything and it doesn’t want to change lifestyles of its elite. Everybody is afraid of another crisis but nobody is willing to fly commercial. Instead of maths, physics and chemistry, the US now wants kids to take up financial literacy as a subject in K-12 schools.

Even without any formal financial literacy, one can see that US and China cannot keep spending a trillion a year to keep the show going. Values of all currencies, commodities and companies are uncertain. There are talks of the Fed raising interest rates but yields on treasuries and bonds are declining at a steady pace. Corporate profits are growing but revenues are declining – S&P 500 revenue dropped 10% in Q3. Even the apparently firm trend in gold is riddled with uncertainties, given the ability of trillion dollar entities to move markets at will.

US has started encouraging China to buy small and mid-sized banks, CoCos (contingent capital instruments) are being advocated for helping continue with status-quo at banks, UK has slipped to 17th position on the corruption index and global luxury market is expected to shrink 8% to $229 bn in 2009. Germany expects 65+ population to grow from 20% to 34% by 2060 and economies the relatively more immigration friendly UK and France are expected to overtake Germany by then.

Citi, Goldman and JPMorgan face downgrading of their debt by Moody’s, Lehman says Barclays should disgorge the excess it earned from buying its assets, Goldman Sachs and Warren Buffet have jointly started the “10,000 Small Businesses Initiative” that would help small firms with working capital, and Mitsubishi UFJ is to raise $11.2 bn from selling shares. ECCU, which funds churches, says about 145 of its borrowers have gone bankrupt because donations are down, and HSBC is discussing a sale and lease back deal for its Paris HQs also.

Air France-KLM and BA are cutting capacity by 5% and 6% respectively, while order books of Airbus and Boeing have reportedly declined significantly in the last one year.

GE, which already has 12,000 employees in China, has set up a new JV for electronic systems for commercial aircraft as China expects to launch its C919 commercial jetliner in 2014. Suntech Power of China, supposedly the world’s largest producer of solar panels, is setting up a unit in US.

GM revenue dropped 26% to $28 bn in Q3 and it has incurred losses of $88 bn since 2005, and yet it holds $43 bn in cash. Ford, Subaru and Volkswagen are the safest vehicles in the world, says a survey by the insurance industry.

Canon is buying Dutch copier and printer producer Oce for $1.1 bn, Hitachi is raising $4.6 bn by issuing equity after a gap of 26 years, and Zhongyi Electronic says it had licensed use of its Chinese fonts to Microsoft only for Windows 95 and Microsoft should pay additional royalty for use in subsequent versions. AOL is trying to get 2,500 to retire voluntarily as revenue plunged 20% last fiscal.

Sales at Home Depot and Lowe’s are down 8% and 3% respectively, and Target, having an average store of 128,000 sq ft, is considering smaller stores, besides adding grocery to more of existing stores.

CT scans of mummies that are several thousand years old have showed symptoms of heart problems, leading to the conclusion that the modern lifestyle alone could not be the cause of heart problems, America is debating whether providing chocolate milk to students could result in more obesity, and a marijuana café has started serving certified medical users at Portland in USA, a month after Obama allowed marijuana for medical reasons under federal laws also.

Crime ridden Venezuela (28 mn people have six mn firearms) seized and destroyed 30,000 guns last week, and dating website beautifulpeople.com said Britons are among the least beautiful people in the world. Celebrities looking for exotic names for their offsprings are paying over $1,500 to language companies to make sure the names do not mean horrible things in other languages; Tom Cruise named his daughter Suri but was aghast to know it meant ‘pickpocket’ in Japanese and ‘turned sour’ in French.

Muammar Gaddafi, during his recent visit to Italy, paid $100 to 200 Italian women for attending a ‘party’ where he tried to make them convert to Islam and compared to a hundred in a normal year, 14,700 Americans have declared their offshore accounts in 70 countries to take advantage of a tax amnesty scheme.

Interesting facts reported last week include origins of some companies. DuPont started with gunpowder in 1802, Nokia was originally a paper mill, Sony started as a radio repair shop, IBM constituents included manufacturers of meat slicers and coffee grinders, AIG was originally an insurance agency in Shanghai, American Express started with a courier business and Motorola began as a producer of battery eliminators.

Where is the world going? Never mind. There isn’t a thing an individual can do to secure his or her future. There are no derivatives that guarantee a certain amount of happiness. The only way out is to practice yoga and ‘feel’ happy.

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