-Caveat Lector-
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Today's Lesson From From My Life: Poetry and Truth
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It was on the 28th of August, 1749, at the stroke of twelve noon, that I
came into the world in Frankfurt on the Main. The constellation was
auspicious: the Sun was in Virgo and at its culmination for the day.
Jupiter and Venus looked amicably on it, and Mercury was not hostile.
Saturn and Mars maintained indifference. Only the Moon, just then
becoming full, was in a position to exert adverse force, because its
planetary hour had begun. It did, indeed, resist my birth, which did not
take place until this hour had passed.
These good aspects, which astrologers in later years taught me to value
very highly, were probably responsible for my survival, for the midwife
was so unskilled that I was brought into the world as good as dead, and
only with great difficulty could I be made to open my eyes and see the
light. It was a harrowing experience for my family, but at least the
townspeople had some benefit from it, inasmuch as my grandfather, Johann
Wolfgang Textor, who was the chief magistrate, was moved by this to
appoint an official birth-assistant and to introduce, or reintroduce,
the instruction of midwives. That was probably a fortunate thing for
many a child thereafter.
=====
Federal Reserve
Fed Signals Coming Hike in Rates
Long bond rallies
Alan Greenspan, the US Federal Reserve chairman, yesterday said he saw
no signs of gathering inflation in the US, but strongly suggested that a
pre-emptive rise in interest rates was likely for the end of the month.
By sending a signal that the Fed intended to take no risks with
inflation, the chairman's remarks provoked a powerful rally on the US
bond markets, pushing yields on the benchmark 30-year US Treasury bond
below 6 per cent.
Stock prices showed modest gains, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average
up 40.53 at 10,825.48 in early afternoon trading on Wall Street.
Mr Greenspan said he saw no sign of inflation and emphasised the Fed
would not act to curb the strong rally in US stock prices - unless it
started to affect the price of products.
But he told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that some
imbalances - in particular the ever-decreasing pool of job seekers -
posed risks to a sustained economic expansion.
He said wage levels were being held down by falling inflation and
continued fears over job security, but if labour markets continued to
tighten, sharp increases in wages beyond productivity growth would
emerge. "Because monetary policy operates with a significant lag, we
have to make judgments not only about the current degree of balance in
the economy, but about how the economy is likely to fare a year or more
in the future under our current policy stance," Mr Greenspan said.
"For monetary policy to foster maximum sustainable economic growth, it
is useful to pre-empt forces of imbalance before they threaten economic
stability .. When we can be pre-emptive we should be, because modest
pre-emptive actions can obviate the need for more drastic actions at a
later date that could destabilise the economy."
Analysts inferred that the reference to "modest pre-emptive actions"
suggested an increase in interest rates of only a quarter of a point at
the next meeting of the Fed's policy-setting committee on June 29-30,
rather than a larger rise.
Mr Greenspan's only explicit comment was that the central bank would not
reduce rates - but that was not anticipated after the committee adopted
a bias in favour of a monetary tightening at its last meeting in May.
Mr Greenspan questioned whether three quarter-point cuts in interest
rates - announced last autumn in a bid to pre-empt a deepening financial
crisis - were still needed.
"What is on the table at this particular stage is whether, having
injected a significant amount of liquidity as a consequence of the
seizing up of markets, do we need all of it still in place? It is not a
judgment [of whether] there is, at the moment, any evidence of
accelerating inflation? In my view, you'd be hard-pressed to find it."
The Fed chairman also hinted that Wednesday's report showing consumer
price inflation dropping to zero in May would not influence the Fed's
decision at the end of the month. He said the consumer price index had
many flaws as a monetary policy target.
Richard Yamarone, senior economist at Argus Research in New York, said
the Fed chairman had no choice but to raise interest rates by a quarter
of a point.
"The rate hike that comes at the end of June will be entirely about
credibility," Mr Yamarone said. "Mr Greenspan has painted himself into a
corner, whereby the Fed's failure to act would compromise its ability to
combat inflation."
The Financial Times, June 18, 1999
Der Fuhrer Invades Yugoslavia
Chinese Reject U.S. Embassy Bombing Explanation
Hmmm. Must have been those Chinese spies who told them we deliberately
bombed the embassy.
Why can't they be stupid like most Americans and believe the endless
crap from NATO?
BEIJING - The Chinese government Thursday publicly rejected the U.S.
explanation that human error, faulty databases, three old maps, and a
failed target review process caused the United States to accidentally
drop five bombs on China's embassy in Belgrade.
Breaking its news blackout on the visit to Beijing by Thomas Pickering,
the U.S. presidential envoy, the government broadcast a point-by-point
rebuttal of what it said were the main results of an American government
inquiry into the causes of the deadly May 7 bombing, saying the report
Mr. Pickering provided ''does not hold water.''
But in a shift from its pattern over the last five weeks, the government
of China also outlined the U.S. government's side of the story to the
Chinese people in a relatively balanced and complete manner. A
significant portion of the evening news broadcast, which reaches
hundreds of millions of viewers, was devoted to reading a summary of the
U.S. report. Earlier U.S. explanations were ridiculed and given short
shrift in the state media.
''Most Chinese people believe it was deliberately planned. We need time
to release that kind of emotion,'' said a Chinese government foreign
policy adviser. ''It's very helpful to give the American version to the
Chinese public.''
[The White House on Thursday said it hoped Beijing would eventually
understand the bombing was an accident, Reuters reported. ''It's our
hope that once China has had a chance to review and absorb the
information that they'll understand that this was a tragic accident,''
said Joe Lockhart, the White House spokesman.]
The contradictory messages from the Chinese government Thursday about
the U.S. bombing reflect the current delicate position of the leaders of
China.
President Jiang Zemin, and Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, the most
Western-leaning of the senior leaders in China, need good political and
economic relations with the United States to pursue their domestic
economic reform agenda.
They have argued that China must work closely with the West to make
itself strong. An extended stand-off with the United States would be
against the interests of China. At the same time, they cannot seem weak
in their dealings with Washington. Moreover, there is real disagreement
within the ruling bureaucracy in China on whether the attack was indeed
intentional.
American members of the Pickering delegation said they did not expect
that Chinese leaders would endorse the U.S. version of events, and said
there may never be agreement on the issue. It would be politically
untenable for Chinese leaders to change their minds after declaring in
the media for weeks that the bombing was intentional, analysts said.
When the crew of a B-2 bomber dropped five 2,000-pound, satellite-guided
bombs onto the Chinese embassy, three Chinese journalists were killed,
20 people were wounded, and Chinese-American relations were pushed into
one of their most serious crises since President Richard Nixon
established ties with the People's Republic more than two decades ago.
Intense nationalism, built up over a century of foreign occupations and
perceived slights from the West, bubbled to the surface. Massive
protests erupted around the country. China pulled out of high-level
military exchanges with the United States, as well as cooperation on
arms control. Talks on the entry of China into the World Trade
Organization were suspended.
The Chinese government offered no evidence in its rebuttal to the U.S.
explanation of the bombing. But it cited what it claimed were the
central elements of the report delivered by Mr. Pickering on Wednesday,
and rejected them one by one. The United States has not yet released the
text of the investigation report, but members of the U.S. delegation
said the report cites a litany of specific mistakes that led to the
accidental bombing. The official press agency, Xinhua, on Thursday
issued a three-part summary of the U.S. report.
According to the Xinhua summary, for instance, ''a U.S. intelligence
officer, in breach of operational rules, employed techniques that
involve the assumption of target locations of a street by comparing the
pattern and numbering system of its parallel streets.''
The U.S. report said such techniques are used in the field by the U.S.
Army for more general purposes, but are ''totally inappropriate'' for
precision targeting, according to the Chinese summary. As a result,
''the intelligence officer mistakenly determined that the building of
the Chinese Embassy was the FDSP,'' the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for
Supply and Procurement, which was the actual target, according to the
summary.
The U.S. explanation is ''not logical,'' China said in its rebuttal.
''Why was the army technique of land navigation used to locate what the
U.S. believed to be an important target?''
The Chinese rejection of the U.S. report was ''expected'' according to
the Chinese foreign policy adviser. A better indication of China's
postbombing political stance toward the United States will come in the
coming weeks and months when China decides to make concrete policy
decisions. ''What's important is the next step,'' the adviser said.
Bilateral talks on with the United States on the entry of China into the
World Trade Organization are one of the most important tests. Chinese
reformers are pushing for entry as a way to lock China into the
international trading system and promote market reforms domestically.
Conservatives have argued that advocates of entry made have made
''traitorous'' concessions.
In an unusually bold question, a Chinese journalist Thursday tried to
pin down a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry on the issue of
whether China would now re-enter the talks with the U.S. now that
America has presented its report. The spokeswoman refused to answer,
telling the journalist to reread an earlier vague answer.
International Herald Tribune, June 18, 1999
Money Laundering and Financial Scams
Missing Money in Frankel Case Grows to $3 Billion
"Helping the poor and needy." Heh, it works for Clinton.
Former Toledo financier Marty Frankel, already suspected of bilking
nearly $1 billion from insurance companies, may have taken three times
as much money as originally estimated, investigators say.
In a new chapter to the nation's largest missing money case,
investigators say they've discovered another $1.9 billion missing from a
brokerage firm the elusive investor ran out of his stone mansion here.
This time, the money wasn't taken from insurance firms but a charitable
foundation.
FBI agents say they are still searching for the 44-year-old investor who
vanished from his Greenwich, Conn., mansion in May.
"It's amazing, but the amount of missing money is still growing,'' said
Maurice Nessen, who has been hired to try to recover most of the money.
"We're talking up to $3 billion.''
For the past month, FBI agents have been searching for Mr. Frankel,
along with nearly $1 billion that's missing from a dozen insurance
companies in five states. The companies all have been forced into
receivership.
Now, the probe has been expanded to include the whereabouts of the $1.9
billion that Mr. Frankel allegedly invested on behalf of a charitable
trust: the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, Mr. Nessen said.
The former prosecutor said Mr. Frankel, who used the name, David Rosse,
established the charity trust in August in the British Virgin Islands.
He then proceeded to use the foundation to shield millions of dollars
over the past year, Mr. Nessen said.
"There was $1.9 billion that was invested on behalf of the charity in
April, and now it's not there,'' said Mr. Nessen, a New York lawyer who
was once a U.S. prosecutor for the southern district of New York.
He said Mr. Frankel concocted an elaborate scheme by pretending to be a
devout Catholic who set up the charitable trust to help needy people.
Using the alias, he persuaded three prominent Catholics to serve as
trustees.
"This guy was a master. He knew the names of the saints. He had all
these books on the Church. He used to tell people how much he wanted to
help the poor and needy,'' Mr. Nessen said. "It was a real con job.''
He now suspects that Mr. Frankel was using the foundation to hide money
from government regulators and the Internal Revenue Service.
The foundation trustees have since hired Mr. Nessen to try to recover
the money so it can be placed with the charities for which it was
intended.
Mr. Nessen has been working with state regulators and federal agents,
who believe Mr. Frankel has left the country.
The three foundation trustees, Thomas Bolan, the Rev. Peter Jacobs, and
Edward Collins, were asked by Mr. Frankel to serve on the board of
trustees of the foundation, but they did not oversee the investments or
the spending, Mr. Nessen said.
"These are all good people who are totally flabbergasted over what
happened,'' Mr. Nessen said. "They thought they were taking part in a
very noble effort. That's what's most distressing.''
As part of the scheme, Mr. Frankel was able to persuade the
Vatican-backed Monitor Ecclesiasticus Foundation to distribute money to
charities on behalf of the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, Mr. Nessen
said.
"He was basically laundering money through the Church,'' he said.
Mr. Nessen does not know where the money was coming from. "That's
something for the FBI to discern.''
The Monitor Ecclesiasticus was founded by Pope Pius IX in the 19th
century to publish the church canons and to disburse charity money
around the world, Mr. Nessen said.
Somehow, Mr. Frankel was able to convince the organization's officials
to "work with his foundation,'' Mr. Nessen said.
Father Jacobs, a well-known New York priest, could not be reached for
comment last night.
When the FBI began its investigation into Mr. Frankel last month, agents
filed an affidavit in federal court in Bridgeport, Conn., alleging that
Mr. Frankel used several aliases and a phony corporation to bilk
millions of dollars from nearly a dozen insurance firms.
In one case, the former Toledoan obtained $44 million from one of the
insurance companies and then wired the money to a Swiss bank account.
The financier, who was stripped of his stockbroker's license in Toledo
seven years ago, has lived in Connecticut for the past six years,
records show.
"On the one hand, you have these insurance companies that are all
missing money, and now you have this charitable foundation with more
missing money,'' Mr. Nessen said. "There is a lot of work to be done.''
Investigators are still trying to figure out how Mr. Frankel was able to
control so much money.
He was banned from trading as a stockbroker by the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission in 1992 after he was sued by two Toledo area
investors. The suits, which were later settled, were filed after the
investors said Mr. Frankel was unable to return $360,000 they gave him
to invest.
Several people who know Mr. Frankel say he rarely left his 12-room
mansion in Greenwich, and protected the home with security cameras and
surveillance lights. He often consulted astrology charts to make his
investments.
When he was in Toledo in November for the funeral of his father, Leon
Frankel, he was surrounded by bodyguards, relatives recall.
While in Connecticut, he founded a brokerage firm, Liberty National
Securities, even though it was not registered with the SEC.
He then persuaded the insurance companies, based in Arkansas, Missouri,
Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Mississippi, to invest their assets through his
brokerage firm.
The eccentric investor was last seen in his mansion in early May, a few
days before an automatic fire alarm sounded in the home.
By the time firefighters arrived, a file cabinet in the mansion was
ablaze, and there were fires burning in two fireplaces. No one was home.
But the day after the fire, authorities said they received a call from a
man identifying himself as Marty Frankel, who asked about the fire in
his home. When they asked where he was calling from, the caller hung up.
The Blade, June 13, 1999
Coffee Market
Depressed State of Coffee Prices Even Worse for Mexico
Years of lousy coffee
The world market for coffee is depressed and for Mexican coffee, which
trades at an almost 30 per cent discount to world prices, the situation
is even worse.
But that is not enough to convince the fifth largest producer of the
aromatic bean to join the rest of the world's coffee growers in a bid to
restrict exports and push prices back up.
Mexico is the only significant coffee producer that is not a member of
the Association of Coffee Producing Countries, but despite repeated
offers to join the cartel, it prefers to steer its own course.
Mexican exporters say they are not only banned from forming part of a
cartel under the North American Free Trade Agreement but controlling
exports would only bring back the corruption that permeated the industry
under the previous quota system.
"We fought for free trade and we prefer to compete under any
circumstances in a free market than putting up with controls - it would
mean the death of the industry," said Jenaro Hernandez, general director
of the Mexican Association of Coffee Exporters.
But the government-supported position has angered many of the country's
nearly 300,000 coffee growers, most of whom live hand-to-mouth
cultivating their small plots high in the Sierra Madre mountains. They
cite an agreement reached earlier this year between Mexico and the
Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to cut oil exports, which
resulted in a 70 per cent rise in crude prices, and wonder why it cannot
be replicated.
The dispute is one of many pitting exporters and manufacturers against
growers, paralysing the industry and leaving it unable to come up with a
co-ordinated policy. In stark comparison with highly successful umbrella
bodies in Brazil or Columbia, there are some 14 different national
coffee organisations in Mexico. The only thing they agree on is that
something needs to be done.
"We can't make any progress because we are practically at a stand-off
over imports," said Fernando Celis Callejas, consultant to the National
Co-ordinator of Coffee Growers.
Growers are bitterly opposed to a move by coffee manufacturers to import
11,000 tonnes of sun-dried robusta beans for their product blends. The
growers argue the cheaper, lower quality imports are further damaging
Mexico's already poor reputation as a producer of inferior quality
beans.
Manufacturers counter that Mexico does not produce enough robust beans
for their needs, being largely a cultivator of fine arabica beans.
More importantly, 65 per cent of domestic consumption is in the form of
cheap instant coffee and manufacturers need to keep costs down in order
to make coffee affordable for Mexico's limited household incomes.
In any case, they note, the argument is academic since the industry will
lose its protection in 2003 under NAFTA. After that only 40 per cent of
coffee made for domestic consumption will have to be of Mexican origin.
The scuffle over imports, however, has blurred a finer point - the
quality of Mexican coffee and dismal internal consumption.
Unlike rich coffee drinking cultures in Brazil and Columbia, Mexico
consumes more soft drinks per capita than anywhere else in the world
outside the US.
Mexicans drink an average of 1kg of coffee beans a year, making them
among the lowest consumers of the coffee-producing countries.
Mexicans have tired of coffee after years of being meted out the
worst-quality beans. The drop in demand backfired on exporters, forced
to sell the excess abroad.
The growers argue the resulting international smear has been exacerbated
by the fact that both growers and exporters are forced to sell the beans
immediately, without waiting for better prices, due to the highly
indebted nature of the industry and lack of credit.
But instead of co-operation within the industry, suspicion now reigns
supreme. Growers believe multinational companies are behind the low
prices, while manufacturers and exporters say growers, often the pawns
of corrupt leaders, disregard their contracts and provide bad-quality
beans.
"What we have to do is produce more and better-quality coffee so that
Mexico can improve its image," said Guillermo Escudero Robles, president
of the exporters association.
"We are doing something wrong and if we don't fix it we are going to be
steam-rolled by the rest of the world."
The Financial Times, June 18, 1999
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Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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