Either the Japanese market is taking a long lunch, or it’s hit a circuit-breaker; hasn’t moved down any further in over an hour. But anyone out there, look at that Hang Seng (Hong Kong) index plummet!

In an article about the sovereign wealth funds, Andrew Leonard sizes up Brush’s economic legacy, quite accurately imo:

The magnitude of the disaster, from a free market apologist point of view, can hardly be overestimated. By abjectly failing to compensate or cushion the “losers” from globalization — whether by boosting safety nets, improving healthcare, or investing significant resources in education and training — the Bush administration guaranteed a growing groundswell of political opposition to global trade. And by failing to properly oversee financial markets, it provided an opportunity for foreign governments that may not share “American” values to become significant players in the heart of the global financial system. Talk about your legacies! The Bush administration not only may have crippled the Republican Party for a generation, but it also might have broken the free market! Whoops!

China Development Bank’s plan to inject US$2 billion into troubled US giant Cititbank has been rejected by the State Council, the cabinet of Chinese government.
…

CDB recently received US$20 billion from Central Huijin Investment Company (CHI), a subsidiary of China Investment Corporation (CIC), China’s sovereign wealth fund, to strengthen its capital base. Analysts said that then extending the US$2 billion bloodline to Citibank would be foolhardy since it might well be interpreted by western markets as channeling sovereign wealth funds to investment under the pretext of commercial banking.

Link. The Chinese are concerned that they not be seen to be using their sovereign wealth fund as a policy instrument, something that doesn’t seem to bother the other countries that are busy buying up our financial institutions. What the heck else are they going to buy? Our land? What’s left of our manufacturing base?

Remember that time when fifteen of your repressed subjects hijacked and crashed a bunch of our planes and killed a bunch of our people? THAT really sucked. How does this sword-thingie work?

Yea, that was awesome.

Or maybe it just reinforces Hugh’s point about who really cracks the whip in the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

What happened to spreading democracy? It’s an oppressive monarchy, for crying out loud. It’s the kind of government that this country was born to overthrow. At best, Bush looks like a big doofus and a hypocrite. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that even ardent Bush lovers are going to appreciate this. And no one’s going to accept the but-we-really-need-the-money defense, either. If that line doesn’t work for prostitutes and drug dealers, it sure as hell shouldn’t work for the President of the United States.

While peak oil and supply and demand concerns have sometimes been put forward to account for the differential between my $81/bbl price and the current price, I don’t think this is the case. For one thing, the way prices change indicates to me that there is a lot of singularly uninformed money in the oil markets. One day the price may change according to a supply report but the next day the market may well react to something else although the underlying fundamental of supply from the previous day remains unchanged. This chasing rumors instead of paying attention to fundamentals has turned the oil market into a vast crap shoot. You have a lot of big money playing the market without really understanding it.