Wednesday, July 6, 2011

News roundup (more fun than smoking herrings)

Kid Dynamite's coverage of Sino Forest (TRE.to) has been good, today's edition is great. Your humble scribe adds comment and we also applaud KD's trading ability in the stock...he's feeling the cloth well, that dude.

Felix Salmon checks out the progress of Sinking Alpha's plan to pay peanuts to monkeys...and finds they're paying peanuts to monkeys. Well what a surprise, SinkingAlpha's plans for TotalWorldDomination™ are hurtling into the abyss of the lowest common denominator instead. One stop shopping for financial mediocrity, thy name is Alpha (update: check out the self-centred pretentious twaddle of Rocco Pendola in the comments section, a case in point if ever there was one).

Gold Resource Corp (GORO) refuses to tell people just how many ounces of gold it did (or more to the point didn't) produce in 2q11, just saying the number was "record". That's saying very little, cos up to now each quarter's production has been pisspoor and so record is beginning to look like "slightly less than pisspoor" instead of anything that can prop up its current $1Bn+ market cap. As mentioned yesterday re. GORO, money talks and bullshit walks, so as GORO doesn't want to talk money, what's the only option left? By the way, i had a decent question mailed in by a regular reader about GORO yesterday and if I can shake off the ennui I might just get round to answering it here on the blert.

Bolivia's inflation hits 4.27% for the first six months of 2011 and to be honest that's not a bad result for the Evo government. The bottom line in Bolivia is that the country has to import large quantities of  foodstuffs (wheat, etc) and the low GDP/capita level means that foodstuffs make up an important percentage of the monthly basket that measures inflation (unlike the think-they're-developed nations that spend more on Playstations and stuff nobody needs). Both monetary and fiscal policy in Bolivia has been very sound and well-run in the Evo years...you can tell that because nobody criticizes him for those.

China hikes interest rates. Another wild surprise.