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Posted by
BradyNet
(
Friday, March 19, '04
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Other Macro favorites of Fox are Celulose & Natural Gas.
Cant believe people are willing to pay USD 39.0 for Gazprom ADRs!
4Q03 GDP up 15%
Debt: I see Tabare playing hardball with Multilaterals to ease flow as they are big in 2005 & 2006.
Nevertheless they are watching the Argy situation vey closely, one of the Tabare´s main economic advisor said something like <If Argy gets a haircut of 50% lets say, What should we do? Knowing the debt/gdp is around 110%?>
We are going to see an important inflow of investment for Celulose IMHO.
The summer season in Punta the best in a decade.
Construction picking up fast.
The only thing I dont like about Uru is the temptantion of renegotiating its debt if & when Argy gets its deal over with.
Are the judgements of DR central bank officials any better than those of DR private banketrs?
DR central bank employees have fabulous salaries, free loans to build sumptuous houses, extremely generous per diem allowances for foreign trips, a luxurious publicly paid club for employee recreation(including free alcoholic drinks) and fabulous pensions.
They are the ones who forecast that the DR inflation for the entire yr 2004 to be 14% while the actual figures for the first two months of 2004 is around 21%(still widely under reported figure) .
<Uccelli indicates that according to the CB, after two quarters of negative growth the final quarter of the year registered positive expansion…> The positive expansion: only in their alcoholic influenced minds! According to street knowledge, the last semester was affected very badly as to economic growth—many businesses could not function due to the continuous 15 plus hours of apagones and many businesses closed!. If there were to be growth, it must be an illusory growth brought on by increased prices!
Is Mejia instructing the CB to report feel good numbers on the economy for the election purpose(His campaign theme is that things are getting better!)?
Specially interesting the part on capacity constraints.
Ive got to say, I admired the french for this move, and I think french muslims and Ayman, have taken this the wrong way. It was meant as a way of ensuring the secular nature of french schools. Minorities should be desperate to have the main public institutions remain secular. Demanding that they be allowed to express what are (as I understand) non-critical aspects of Islam within the public sphere of life, is asking for a backlash. What will happen if there is compulsory catholic education in French schools?
This is nonsense, and the sooner french muslims realise that insisting on their little girls wearing headscarfs in school just emphasises their separateness and not their frenchness, then the better off they will be.
Actually Opti, there are all sorts of reasons why what you say may be right, but this point is not one of them. Local energy prices cannot be set by foreigners unless Russians permit this. I dont see why Russians should. Frankly speaking, if I was setting russian policy, I would be happy to encourage more foreign investment, provided that I keep tight control over pipeline access and also over tax policy. This works if you do not offer guarantees on future taxation. Then when the time is right just close down all the tax loopholes and voila - you have a bunch of foreigners who paid way too much for russian oil assets/licenses..
Of course in a very suble way you are right. Once Western Oil majors turn up and learn some of the rules of the game (ie hire russians to run local operations) they have plenty of money to begin their lobbying operations. A brief glance at the state of the world suggests these guys have a lot of skill when it comes to lobbying (aka bribing) local politicians..
I do not understand how is it that you insist on that. Whoever sold end of January had plenty of opportunities to buy back bonds 5 to 15 points cheaper. Guano being the exception.
I believe that it was well stablished that the Taliban government had very strong links wil OBL, and OBL reivindicated 11/9. So nothing wrong with that. Irak is a different story.
Let me clarify that I have no problem whatesoever with Saddam being ousted as long as the other Saddams of the world are being ousted too and with UN consensus (Burma among them). Unless that is the case, then I have to believe that Saddam was kicked out because Cheney wanted Iraki oil.
In any case, I do not have strong views on any of the above. My posting was in response to your comment on ZP. I am not a ZP supporter (why would I be?). Having followed his campaign though, I see no contradiction in his statements.
<The Moscow office of Shell, one potential buyer of Sibneft shares, says the company is ready to participate in joint ventures in Russia, not to buy Russian companies' stocks.>
http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?pr...
and BTW today duma voted overwhelmingly for amendments to the law on government - russian PM must be russian national.
French authorities are taking seriously a letter that was faxed to a Parisian newspaper March 16 threatening attacks inside France and against French interests abroad. Early indications point to a possible link with Chechen guerrillas and raise questions about other potential connections.
A letter faxed to several French newspapers March 16 warned of
possible attacks in the country and against French interests
abroad by Islamist extremists. The letter threatens to "plunge
France into terror and remorse and spill blood outside its
frontiers," said the deputy editor of Le Parisien, which received
a copy of the letter. French intelligence services are analyzing
the communique.
Sources close to the French government tell Stratfor that
security officials are taking the threat very seriously, in part
due to the letter's content. Public transportation systems in
particular are on full alert, and public warnings have been
issued for people to take extra care. The national threat level
has been raised from orange to red, the second-highest of four
levels.
Sources note that the two-page fax resembles a recent taped warning from al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, which was broadcast Feb. 24 by Arabic television channel Al- Arabiya. In the tape, al-Zawahiri railed against the recently passed French ban on religious symbols in public schools, including the Muslim hijab (headscarf), calling the measure "a new sign of the Crusader hatred which Westerners harbor against Muslims while they boast of freedom, democracy and human rights."
The ban has been extremely unpopular in the Muslim world and
religious leaders of various stripes have criticized it widely.
Islamist militant groups needing to generate fresh public support
at home could calculate that a retaliatory strike against France
would help do that -- and build on a show of power in neighboring
Spain.
It is too early to say definitively who was behind the threat and
if they are actually serious, but the letter raises the
possibility that France could be the site of the next March 11-
style bombing. Moreover, it raises the troubling prospect for
Paris that the interests of North African and Chechen militants
might be converging in France -- possibly under some kind of al
Qaeda banner.
The justice and interior ministries said the letter stated it was
sent "on behalf of the servants of Allah, the powerful and wise,"
and was signed by a group calling itself the Movsar Barayev
Commando. Barayev was a militant leader who led the October 2002
hostage-taking in a Moscow theater. He was killed along with
other militants and many of the hostages during the Russian
rescue effort. Barayev had two brothers, also militant leaders:
One was killed in Chechnya, but the other is thought to be still
at large.
Stratfor sources note that French intelligence might have found evidence linking Chechen Islamist militants to the threat and that local militants, who at one time fought in Chechnya against Russia, might be involved. French intelligence also postulates that Chechen, North African and local Islamists have joined forces in France. This would not be much of a leap: In late 2002, French security broke up a cell of Algerian and Moroccan militants in and around Paris that had been planning attacks against Russian assets in France. The suspects reportedly trained with Chechens in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge and wanted to avenge the deaths of people killed fighting alongside Chechen separatist rebels, according to the French Interior Ministry.
There are other factors that support a possible
Chechen/Islamist/local militant connection. The French Chechen
community actively raises funds to support Chechen fighters --
many of whom are mercenaries. In light of the global crackdown on
militant financing, there are indications that Chechen rebels
have fallen on hard times. An attack in France by Chechen
militants would raise their profile in the Middle East, pushing
them to the forefront of the pan-Islamist struggle, which is also
thought to be an ambition of Chechen militants. This, in turn,
could open new sources of financial support for the fight against
Moscow.
There are other circumstantial connections as well. Tunisians, Algerians and Moroccans make up a large percentage of the French Muslim population, and militants from these countries reportedly have fought in Chechnya. Chechens and North Africans also trained together over several years at al Qaeda-run training camps in Afghanistan. Such connections could result in cooperation elsewhere, such as in France -- or Spain. At the least, these militants could be seeking to employ Chechen methods in Europe.
A Chechen connection would be extremely worrying for Paris. It would be hard to find a group with more expertise with sophisticated explosives and other types of militant attacks. Those attacks have included bold strikes such as the Moscow theater hostage-taking and numerous bombings of the Russian public transportation system, including the Moscow metro and trains in southern Russia. Since the beginning of their campaign in 1994, Chechens have tended to avoid the use of suicide bombers -- a tactic that they adopted only recently.
In that respect, Chechen attacks against Russian trains resemble the Madrid bombings more than attacks by other Islamists, down to the detail of explosives-stuffed backpacks left in trains. That similarity between Russia and Madrid raises another possibility - - also based purely on circumstantial evidence: The new threat in France could be connected to the Madrid bombing.
Coincidentally -- or perhaps not -- a Frenchman who converted to
Islam named David Courtailler will go on trial beginning March 17
in Paris for links to Islamist extremists. According to a March
16 report from Reuters, Courtailler met in the past with a key
suspect in the Madrid bombings, Jamal Zougam, during a visit to a
mosque in Madrid.
Finally, a connection between the March 16 letter and the recent
threats by a previously unknown group calling itself AZF to bomb
the French rail system cannot be ruled out. That mystery has not
been solved -- and while security forces had determined that
Chechens were not at the top of the list of suspects, they might
be rethinking that conclusion.
http://www.stratfor.com
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