Daily Dispatches

By Mandi Zonneveldt
Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia
Monday, January 8, 2007

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21023721-664,00.html

Market master Warren Buffett famously said: "A group of lemmings looks like a pack of individualists compared with Wall Street when it gets a concept in its teeth." The same anecdote has been used to describe the Australian resource industry's approach to hedging -- a risk minimisation strategy.

By Benn Steil
Financial Times, London
Friday, January 5, 2007

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/518a0102-9c61-11db-9c9b-0000779e2340.html

It is remarkable how the world's short history of floating exchange rates has affected popular thinking about what is eternally normal and proper in the economic system. Recently, China-bashing U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham wrote matter-of-factly that "one of the fundamental tenets of free trade is that currencies should float."

By Adrian Ash
The Market Oracle
Saturday, January 6, 2007

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article204.html

Only in finance do the losers get to write history. The government then prints their memoirs in the statute books, while a new volume of folly and greed is begun.

Witness Barnard's Act of 1734. It sought "to prevent the infamous practice of stock-jobbing" that had peaked and exploded with the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Investors had long since fled Change Alley, however, and gone back to trading government bonds instead.

Mongolia Is Roiled
By Miner's Huge Plans

World-Class Deposits
Spur Battle for Spoils;
Makeover for 'Toxic Bob'

By Patrick Barta
The Wall Street Journal
Thursday, January 4, 2007

OYU TOLGOI, Mongolia -- When Robert Friedland first set foot on this desolate land in 2001, the mining magnate saw a windswept desert, some rocks, and the opportunity to turn Mongolia into the world's next big natural-resources play.