India’s
Middle Class Hit Hard as Rupee Pushes Up Prices - (www.bloomberg.com) Mumbai taxi driver Saiyad Ahmed Ali has cut back on fruit
and fish, from about twice weekly to once a month these days as prices surge.
He’ll tell you the culprit: India’s weakening currency. “The rupee’s value has
been falling, gas is getting more expensive and fewer people want to take
cabs,” said Ali, who has seen his daily income fall by about a third, to less
than 400 rupees ($6.05) after the costs of running his taxi. “Life here in the
big city has become more difficult.” A 17 percent plunge in the rupee this year
has driven up the cost of imports such as petroleum and chemicals used in
packaging. As a result, companies have raised prices for consumer staples like
cooking oil and soap to compensate for imported raw-material and transport
costs. In Mumbai trading today, the rupee climbed 1.1 percent, to 65.3950 to
the dollar at 2:50 p.m. For the year, the Indian currency has been the
second-worst performer, after the South
African Rand,
among 24 emerging-market currencies tracked by Bloomberg.
Foot-wide Hamptons pathway sold for $120000 - (www.cnbc.com) This
makes real estate prices in the ritzy Hamptons look like chump change. Two Wall
Street financiers locked horns and bid each other up in a face-to-face auction
for an overgrown 1,885-foot-long strip of land, just 1 foot wide, running
through the dunes to the sea, a local official on Long Island said Thursday. The
winning bid was $120,000. That's $120,000 for what is essentially a footpath to
the ocean. "They were very cordial afterwards," said Wayne Thompson,
property manager for New York's Suffolk County on Long Island. "One was
represented by a lawyer and the other showed (up). The one without the lawyer
won!" The winner, after a total of 34 bids and counter-bids, was Marc
Helie, who according to Bloomberg, is employed by Chevalier Investments, LLC,
in Manhattan.
India goes from emerging star to problem
child NYT - (www.cnbc.com) Its
economy now stands in disarray, with the prospect of worse to come in the next
few months. Vinod Vanigota, a Mumbai wholesaler of imported computer hard
drives, said sales dropped by a quarter in the last two weeks. The rupee,
India's currency, has been so volatile in recent days that he began revising
his price lists every half-hour. Business activity at Chip Com Traders,
where he is the managing director and co-owner, has slowed so sharply that
trucking companies plead for business. ''One of the companies called today and
said, 'Don't you have a parcel of any sort for us to deliver today?' '' Mr.
Vanigota said. The economic decline has laid bare chronic problems, little
remarked upon during the recent boom. An antiquated infrastructure, a sclerotic
job market, exorbitant real estate costs and bloated state-owned enterprises
never allowed manufacturing, especially manufacturing for export, to grow
strong.
Poland
Seizes Private Pension Funds – (www.reuters.com) - Poland
said on Wednesday it will transfer to the state many of the assets held by
private pension funds, slashing public debt but putting in doubt the future of
the multi-billion-euro funds, many of them foreign-owned. The changes went
deeper than many in the market expected and could fuel investor concerns that
the government is ditching some business-friendly policies to try to improve
its flagging popularity with voters. The Polish pension funds' organisation
said the changes may be unconstitutional because the government is taking
private assets away from them without offering any compensation. Announcing the
long-awaited overhaul of state-guaranteed pensions, Prime Minister Donald Tusk
said private funds within the state-guaranteed system would have their bond
holdings transferred to a state pension vehicle, but keep their equity
holdings.
REALTOR
Scumbag Confesses to Stealing Appliances - (www.timesunion.com) Federal
authorities say a former Charlotte-area real estate agent has pleaded guilty on
charges that she sold appliances stolen from vacant homes owned by the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development. The U.S. Attorney's office said 49-year-oldSember Lynn Smathers pleaded guilty on Monday to conspiracy to
steal government property. According to documents, Smathers used a master
key to enter the vacant HUD homes and removed appliances valued at $13,678 from
the homes between September 2008 and July 2009. In February 2009,
prosecutors say Smathers and a co-conspirator set up a business in Shelby where
they sold the appliances and other items stolen from the homes.
With
10 Year A Breath Away From 3.00%, Just 50bps Left Until The "Disorderly
Rotation" - (www.zerohedge.com)
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