By Alan Beattie at ft.com Put a jaguar, a bear, a tiger and a panda together and you might get a good show but you won’t get a quiet life. The Bric grouping – Brazil, Russia, India and China – has become a shorthand for the rise of emerging markets in the global economy. And after a rather stellar decade, the Brics mainly had a good crisis from which they are now rapidly exiting. Goldman Sachs,... 

The opening last week in Dubai of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building at 2,717 feet, is a physical reminder of an underappreciated risk for 2010: the possibility that countries that rode the debt issuance boom of the mid-2000s will have trouble paying their creditors. (The Philadelphia Inquirer and Britain’s The Independent have also documented the human cost of Dubai’s... 

The signs are everywhere that oil is headed for stratospheric highs – $200, $250 or even $300 a barrel. Some of these signs are just plain obvious. But even the subtle indicators are telling us that some very expensive energy costs headed our way. Let me tell you about one such indicator that I came across over the New Year holiday. A tiny news item said that Saudi Arabian oil concern Aramco is abandoning... 

It hasn’t been in the limelight recently, but it is coming. According to CNBC contributor John Kilduff of Round Earth Capital, we will soon see the price of reach $100 per barrel. On CNBC’s Jan. 11 “The Kudlow Report,” host Larry Kudlow asked Kilduff what it would take for the Obama’s administration to change its energy policy to allow for more oil exploration and drilling. “Oil is... 

In late 2009, former Merrill Lynch economist, now with the Canadian firm, Gluskin Sheff, said the following:   “The credit collapse and the accompanying deflation and overcapacity are going to drive the economy and financial markets in 2010. We have said this repeatedly that this recession is really a depression because the (post-WW II) recessions were merely small backward steps in an inventory... 

New numbers from China’s customs agency say the country’s exports for 2009 were more than $1.2 trillion, slightly ahead of Germany. Exports in December rose nearly 18 percent from a year earlier. At the same time, imports leapt nearly 56 percent. Asian Development Bank economist Zhuang Jian says strong performance in the last two months of 2009 helped China’s export surge. Zhuang... 

Fears of a double-dip recession in the world’s biggest economy were heightened today when Washington announced that the US shed 85,000 jobs last month. Dashing hopes that America was pulling smoothly out of its toughest postwar economic setback, the commerce department revealed that the expected pre-Christmas hiring spree had failed to materialise. Wall Street had been expecting fresh evidence... 

by Jim Willie, CB. Editor, Hat Trick Letter | January 6, 2010 The year 2008 bore my mark as the year the system broke. A public article addressed the issues, laid out before the breakdown occurred in September of that year. The consequences for the many failures, the desperate nationalizations, the hasty scrambles to put financial sewage under USGovt ownership, the realization of TARP as a vast slush... 

by Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. 01-04-10 If you think 2010 is going to bring investors a carefree, nonstop ride to glory, think again! Profit opportunities abound, and we intend to be among the first to lead you to them. But we’re also here to give you advance warnings of threats that can sneak up from behind and catch you by surprise. Case in point: The danger that Treasury bonds will fall sharply in... 

it may crush the existing structure of Fannie and Freddy and drag the economy further down, no matter how many dollars the fed throws at it here are the events: each individual event will have no visible effect, but combined will crash the economy: these are all pending events, many listed on MW as individual events, but no one looks at them all together – but that is how we will feel them in...