With corporate earnings season well under way, Lazard Ltd. (LAZ – 27.50) took its turn in the earnings confessional this morning…(Read More)
LAZ’s adjusted per-share profit couldn’t top expectations
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ANR will reduce its overall production to 4 million tons per year
After the market closed on Friday, Alpha Natural Resources, Inc. (ANR – 23.19) announced plans to idle four mines in Kentucky and West Virginia, citing softer demand from its electric utility customers…(Read More)
Manappuram Finance can’t accept deposits: RBI
MUMBAI: Manappuram Finance Ltd , which provides loans using gold as collateral, is not allowed to accept or renew deposits from the public, the Reserve Bank of India said, noting the firm gave up its licence to take deposits in March 2011.
The RBI said on its website that Manappuram Finance had been accepting deposits from the public and had been issuing deposit receipts in the name of MAGRO, a sole proprietary concern of Shri V.P Nandakumar, who is Manappuram’s executive chairman.
Manappuram said the notice was the result of a technical error and that it had not accepted deposits since converting to a non-deposit-taking, non-banking financial company.
“There is some balance. While repaying that, they have found out some mistake, some technical error,” I. Unnikrishnan, the firm’s managing director, told Reuters.
The remaining balance of deposits is about 900,000 Indian rupees ($18,350), Unnikrishnan said.
PFC to raise Rs 40,000 crore in 2012-13
[unable to retrieve full-text content]State-run lender Power Finance Corporation aims to raise Rs 40,000 crore in 2012-13 and is scouting for a partner for its subsidiary PFC Consulting’s global foray.
Recent options activity suggests that some hedged players are going short
It was a triumphant week for stocks, as traders cheered a significant upside surprise in January’s nonfarm payrolls report…(Read More)
SKS Micro securitises Rs 243 cr of receivables
HYDERABAD: India’s only listed micro-lender SKS Microfinance today said that it has securitized Rs 243 crore of receivables from borrowers outside of Andhra Pradesh.
According to SKS, the transaction is rated A1+(SO) by rating company Care indicating a strong capacity for timely payment of short-term debt obligations.
The news gave a fillip to the stock of SKS and pushed it up nearly 10 per cent to the upper circuit at Rs 98.20 on Bombay Stock exchange today.
S Dilli Raj, chief financial officer SKS Microfinance said, “SKS delivered all its promises to the credit-granting community through the painful transition phase, post the AP MFI Act. Now, it is time to reap the fruits of consolidation.”
The rated pool comprises receivables from 3,22,312 woman borrowers from the weaker sections as defined by the Reserve Bank of India, the company said.
“The pool is well diversified with a single branch accounting for less than one per cent of the pool, with the average loan amount being Rs 11,131,” a company statement said.
Prior to this transaction, the company had completed six securitizations post the AP MFI Act. All the rated papers have shown robust collection efficiency of more than 98 per cent. Credit enhancement has not been utilised in any of these structures, it added.
International Human Rights Day
December 10th, 2008 will mark the 60th birthday of the United Nations Declaration Of Human Rights (DHR) and kick off a year long propaganda campaign pressing its agenda. The document has 30 articles which purport to catalog the rights that every human has. Most of those rights are what can be called positive rights, things that a person can demand someone provide for them. By contrast, negative rights are the ones that we, as Americans, are most familiar with. They include the rights to life, liberty and property. They say that nobody has a right to take the life, the liberty or the property of any individual without his consent.
The DHR is riddled with inconsistencies and inner conflicts. It begins by saying that all of the listed rights are inalienable. The normal view of “inalienable” means “cannot be alienated” by anyone, including government. The DHR ends with articles describing the circumstances where the stated inalienable rights can be alienated by the United Nations or member governments. Rights are given and rights are taken away. The term “inalienable” in the introduction is an outright fraud.
Many positive rights are granted under the DHR, such as the right to food, water, shelter, education and so forth. Negative rights, such as the right to own property without confiscation, are also granted. Whenever you grant positive and negative rights together, there is an insoluble problem. In order to provide anything to anybody, it must first be taken from someone else. In order to take it from someone else, their property rights must necessarily be violated. The donor has no rights in the confiscated property. Inalienable property rights are a fraud under the DHR.
Compulsory education under the Declaration is to be directed at socializing our children, making good subjects of international government and furthering the activities of the United Nations. The silly notion of educating our children to help them to be more productive and prosperous never occurs to the writers of the DHR. Education under DHR is a fraud.
Article 29 (1) says that “Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.” This manifests itself in calls for compulsory community service for all citizens. There is discussion of that very thing in America today. If a person is compelled to do service against his or her will by anyone, including politicians and bureaucrats, that is a form of slavery or involuntary servitude. It is in direct conflict with article 4 of the DHR: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude…” Freedom doesn’t exist under DHR.
Article 30 ends the list. It says that “Nothing in the Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.” The net effect of that statement is that, if anyone tries to roll back government interference, to limit welfare, unemployment, social security or any other government program, they are guilty of humanitarian crimes under the Declaration. Their rights are not protected. They have no rights, under the DHR, to speak or write about the abolition of those programs, belong to organizations that promote their abolition or take part in rallies or hold seminars that speak out against them.
The bottom line is that the Declaration Of Human Rights is not a statement of inalienable rights, in any sense of the word. It is, rather, a comprehensive manifesto, aimed at promoting world socialism under the United Nations. The U.N. was founded on the idea that national sovereignty is an outdated notion and that an international government is needed to enforce peace and to provide for equitable distribution of the world’s wealth.
Article 22. “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international cooperation, and in accordance with the organization and resources of each state, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.” As Karl Marx, the father of communism, said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
The DHR is the socialist manifesto. This December 10th and for the whole year, people interested in maintaining free societies need to counter the United Nations propaganda with information on the reality of the document and the world socialist agenda of the United Nations.
CTCT jumps 20% in today’s session on better-then-expected results
Shares of Constant Contact, Inc. (CTCT – 31.37) are soaring in today’s session, after the online marketing maven took its turn in the earnings booth last night…(Read More)
The Recession Brings the Division of Labor to My Neighborhood
By J.D. Seagraves, on December 12th, 2008
I really hate shoveling snow. I live on a large corner lot with lots of sidewalk, so the job can take me over an hour. Snowblowers, I’ve found, are overrated. I’ve had two and neither did a very good job and both had maintenance issues. I bought both used, so that might be part of the problem, but when faced with buying a new one (after my 2005 model died this past week), I thought about how much I hated dealing with the snow and questioned the economics of hiring someone to do the shoveling for me.
It’s a little embarrassing. I’m thirty and work from home. I guess I could be considered “lazy” for not doing my own snow removal, but I prefer to think of myself as an ardent believer in the economic concepts of comparative advantage and the division of labor . So I went on Craig’s List and posted a job for “Regular Snow Removal, Good Pay” with all the details. Since there was only one local posting offering snow-removal service, I didn’t know if I’d get a response… But I didn’t have to wait long to find out.
Almost instantly, I got two emails. By the time I woke up the next day, I had ten. By the end of the second day, more than twenty. Two people stopped by my house to introduce themselves. And after about eight inches of snow rained down last night, a third young man showed up, unannounced, to take care of it for me.
I paid him $40 and he did a great job. Was this worth it? Well, consider this: as a freelance writer, I typically earn between $25 and $50 an hour. My average is probably around $40. So, assuming I can find an extra hour of work to do, I just have to think of it this way: would I rather spend an extra hour writing or shoveling snow? It’s an easy decision for me to make. In fact, even if I earned only $20 or even $10 an hour, I still think it’d be worth it — that’s how much I hate dealing with the snow.
The exuberant responses I’ve gotten from people wanting to shovel my sidewalk and driveway have me thinking of other ways I can kill two birds with one stone: help people who are out of work and lessen the number of unpleasant tasks I have to perform. I’m thinking of hiring someone to do my family’s laundry, for example. It’s the type of thing that always seems to get only half done (i.e., all of my clean clothes are still in the basement, not hung up in my closet) for one reason or another. Perhaps picking up an extra hour or two of writing work (which I enjoy) could save me and my wife from having to do the laundry (a constant source of marital strife) and help someone put food on the table too. Capitalism is win-win.
How a Free(d) Market Would Give Us Zero Unemployment
By J.D. Seagraves, on December 19th, 2008
One persistent problem in America’s political discourse is the misuse of the term “free market.” So-called “conservatives” like President Bush and his Republican acolytes like to claim that they support the “free market,” and liberals, normally skeptical of everything that comes out of conservatives’ mouths, take their word for it. The Right defends the system we have as “free market capitalism,” which aids the Left in its straw-man attacks against it. A side effect of this inexact taxonomy is that real free-market partisans are misconstrued as defenders of “Big Business.” But as Austrian theorist and Cato blogger Roderick Long demonstrates , this is far from being the case.
There is currently a debate raging between the so-called “left” and “right” factions of the libertarian underground. The so-called “left” faction, led by Professor Long, insists that businesses would be smaller and more democratic in the absence of the state. The “right” faction, while not defenders of the current system (which many of them consider to be “fascist”) argue that businesses would be even larger under completely laissez-faire, and this would probably be a good thing.
The libertarian-right’s case is based on the size-limiting effects of anti-trust laws and protectionist trade policies, among other regulations. At first, this argument is compelling, but as Long points out, these effects are likely very minimal when compared to the tremendously destructive impact the government has on would-be small businesses. Just imagine, he says, if there were no longer any licensing requirements for starting a taxi service: tens of thousands of cab companies would start up tomorrow. What if you could open a restaurant in your living room? What if you could start a daycare without jumping through burdensome regulatory hoops? What if you could hire people at any wage at which they were willing to work? Indeed, there would likely be no unemployment under laissez-faire.
It should be stressed that, for the most part, the “left” and “right” factions of anarcho-libertarianism agree on the proper role for government: none . Neither faction supports the regulations that keep firms small or prevent them from starting up at all. This is largely an academic debate about how laissez-faire would work if ever adopted, but both sides agree that it would work better than the current system, and that it is more moral.
Personally, I come down on Professor Long’s side, and I think it’s important for libertarians to differentiate themselves from conservatives at every turn. Libertarians are not conservatives — they are liberals in the classical sense. In fact, modern liberalism is merely a variant of classical conservatism, which is one reason there’s so little difference between the two Establishment parties. Long says that today’s liberals attempt to use conservative means to achieve liberal ends, such as full employment. But in reality, classical liberal ends (laissez-faire) would achieve those ends more effectively, and more morally, too.