Tuesday Sep 26, 2006

Floatation devices

Taipan Group's Dynamic Market Alert

-- Floatation devices
-- Clowns & Harlots: An American Tradition

--------------------------

They’ll Give You $2,184 to Start Making Killer Gains in Stocks, Options and More

They chow down roast beef sandwiches for breakfast with gulps of black coffee. Nothing stops them. They pulled in 122% on Evergreen Solar, 22% on Blockbuster and 50% on Frontier Oil.

They racked up 38 triple-digit winners and totaled 4,500% gains for the last five years -- That’s literally a 100% winner every two months.

Now, they’ll give you $2,184 to start making your own killer gains in stocks, options, commodities and more.

Click here to learn more…

--------------------------

Floatation devices

by J. Christoph Amberger

Much has been made of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his meeting with Senators Schumer and Graham on their proposal of introducing a 27.5% tariff on Chinese imports... unless Beijing allows the yuan to strengthen against the greenback.

The media buzz about this event resulted in the yuan rising 0.14% to 7.9105 against the dollar in Shanghai yesterday. Incremental as that move was, it represented the highest increase since China loosened the official dollar peg more than a year ago.

Since then, the yuan has gained 2.5% against the greenback.

The U.S. senators’ hold that Beijing is artificially keeping the yuan at low rates to keep Chinese exports cheap and economic growth humming.

Of course, they have a point. And it’s not like this technique is quite alien, even to the Americans. The U.S. government has pretty much allowed the same to happen to the greenback since U.S. manufacturers clamored for lower dollar valuations against the euro, the yen and the pound back in late 2001.

Since then, the dollar has declined by over 25% -- to the joy of U.S. exporters.

-- Of course, any flotation of the yuan against the dollar is merely a gesture.

Because Chinese exports aren’t cheap because the yuan is artificially low. (If it is pegged against the dollar, there is really no difference.)

China’s exports are cheap because nobody really knows what Chinese labor costs. The Chinese central banks has been pumping money into the economy like there’s no tomorrow... mostly in the shape of business loans they expect will never be repaid.

An enterprising Chinese businessman requires some start-up cash, mostly to bribe an official to get him a loan. Since he doesn’t expect to be forced to pay it back, he can basically produce whatever he wants for almost nothing... and sell his output way below cost. (Why do you think you can pick up Rolex knock-offs at every street corner for a buck?)

It makes perfect sense. Not from an economic but from a strategic perspective: China wants to load up on currency and physically move manufacturing capacity from other parts of the world to its homeland.

As a result, Chinese banks have enormous amounts of nonperforming loans on their books. The full extent of them will not be made public until after the Beijing Olympic Games... and probably result in a major banking crash come 2009.

But to Beijing, that matters little. They consider it seed money.

Clowns & Harlots: An American Tradition

by Christopher Corbett
 
It’s Banned Books Week, brought to you by the American Library Association, which for a quarter of a century has been doggedly fighting the good fight against that all-American itch to censor.  Censorship is an old tradition, a custom as familiar in the time of Cotton Mather as in the age of Jerry Falwell. 

Naturally a country that prides itself on its cherished freedoms and spreads democracy around the globe would observe Banned Books Week.  Makes sense to me.  We are busy showing the benighted the righteous path.  Meanwhile -- if you can believe the ALA, and who would doubt the librarians? -- the urge to ban books is as robust as ever.
         
The banning of books is an American tradition.  You don’t hear much about anyone actually trying to burn a witch these days (not that I want to give anyone any ideas) but book banning is older than the country.  It has followed us from the time of simple hand-set printing press on to the information superhighway and the era of the Internet.
        
Americans (or at least a good number of Americans) love to curl up with a good book and figure out how to make sure that no one else gets to curl up with that book.  The impulse to ban books can in fact lead to burning books.  It is a curious one.  Although fundamentalists of all stripes tend to be in the vanguard, they are not the only ones who wish to ban books.  Persons of all colors like to ban books.  And of all creeds, too.  It appeals to the homegrown fascist.

Most often a person who wishes to ban a book may be thought to be a person incapable of thought.  If you are the first member of your family to walk erect and wear shoes then quite naturally book banning might appeal to you.  But you don’t have to be a moron.  You merely need to be rigid, fixed in your thinking.  It helps immensely if you believe that you are doing the work of the Lord.  God wants this book banned.  He told me.

So every year the nation’s librarians monitor the banning of books from sea to shining sea, from purple mountains majesty, above the fruited plains, across amber waves of grain and all that.  Book banning appears to know no geographic boundaries.  It is as possible in a Chicago suburb as in the wilds of Arkansas.

Although many of the most frequently banned books tend to be juvenile titles that many older readers will not be familiar with -- and some of these are classics. Who does not know Mark Twain, John Steinbeck or J.D. Salinger?  I am glad to report that although they no longer lead the field, these distinguished American writers continue to be among the most often banned. 

Book banning is plainly a grave assault on the First Amendment; in other words, it is unconstitutional.  A person who is capable of such a thing is truly a danger.  We worry about terrorism abroad but what of terrorism here?  A mind capable of banning books is surely as dangerous as a man with a box cutter.

According to the ALA, rubes and yahoos in this country have banned Chaucer, Aristophanes, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Boccaccio, Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

The Radcliffe Publishing Course, the ALA notes, has a list of the 100 most important novels of the past century – naturally, nearly half of those -- 42 of the 100 have been banned somewhere.  These include such sinful works as The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Sun Also Rises and All the Kings Men.

A cursory glance would indicate that S-E-X is the culprit.  Sex is the great boogey man, the serpent in paradise.  It is ever lurking. Any hint is sinful.  Attempts to inform children about simple matters of reproduction or human sexuality are plainly dangerous.

In the past decade -- 1990-2000 -- there were 6,364 challenges issued against books in America, according to the ALA. But the grim news is that research by librarians suggests that for each challenge reported there may be as many as four or five which go unreported.

Lists of banned books make no sense to the casual reader, for according to the ALA, somehow Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen (that’s a children’s book) and The New Joy of Gay Sex can both wind up on the same watch list.  Go figure: To Kill A Mockingbird and Heather Has Two Mommies (that last one is about lesbians and we know how the Lord feels about those gals), Where’s Waldo (also for kids) and American Psycho (not for kids)…  As the man says, I’m not making this up.

The scope of this selection is breath-taking and alarming. It seems to the casual glance the work of pranksters.  This has to be a hoax, a kind of Saturday Night Live sketch.  Fodder for John Stewart’s The Daily Show.  But it’s not. 

Naturally, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World -- savage satirical novels that look at what a totalitarian future might hold -- make the list.  Orwell and Huxley would have expected nothing less. Nice touch, that.

--------------------------

TAIPAN TIDINGS

An unknown Texas company is hand-picked by China’s $23 billion energy cartel. Their mission: Dominate Southeast Asia’s 40-year oil boom. Invest in this Texas hotshot today and you can crush the S&P 500 by 403% over the next four months -- guaranteed!

Click here to learn more...

Earnings Announcements for Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Actuant Corporation, Financial Federal Corporation, and McCormick & Company Inc are releasing earnings.

Brought to you by your FREE American Capitalist
http://www.americancapitalist.net 

Unlock Dates for September 2006

 
9/27/06 - Himax Technologies is unlocking 52 million shares.

Wendy’s will distribute its remaining 82.75% stake in Tim Hortons Inc on September 29, 2006.  When these shares flood the market, look for THI to drop.  THI has a PE of 19 as compared to a company like McDonald’s, which trades with a PE of 16, is much cheaper, and has more growth.

Brought to you by Extreme Volatility Speculator
http://www.vixtrader.com

Upgrades and Downgrades:

Accenture downgraded by RBC Capital Markets from Sector Perform to Underperform.

Altria downgraded by AG Edwards from Buy to Hold.

Comcast downgraded by AG Edwards from Buy to Hold.

JC Penney downgraded by Credit Suisse from Neutral to Underperform.

KohlÕs downgraded by Credit Suisse from Outperform to Neutral.

Nordstrom downgraded by Credit Suisse from Outperform to Neutral.

Verizon downgraded by AG Edwards from Buy to Hold.

Career Education upgraded by UBS from Reduce to Neutral.

Lear upgraded by UBS from Reduce to Neutral.

Brought to you by GRESSOR
http://www.gressor.com

Quote of the Day:

“Absolutism is great for getting a lot of work done, but when absolutisms collide, it can be a loud and fatal train wreck.”

- Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (2006)

P.S. This stock could return 9-14 times your money…

By cornering the best diabetes research in America. You can quietly make a fortune with one stock. For two years I’ve wanted to tell my readers about this company that has the potential to cure diabetes. I couldn’t before because there was one last piece of information waiting to fall into place. Now it has!

All the details are in this Special Report.

Click here to read it…