It’s not often that a country of 80 million people goes belly up, but that’s what I’ve been predicting in Asia TImes for the past year. Today the New York Times reports that Egypt’s foreign exchange reserves have fallen to just $10 billion–about a month and a half of imports–from $36 billion before the fall [...]

The Financial Times’ “Beyond Brics” blog quotes a Price Waterhouse report on China’s move into Europe:

The old adage of China using the same word for crisis and opportunity may seem particularly apt when looking at the eurozone. Chinese companies are eager to use Europe’s debt woes to boost their clout in the world’s biggest single [...]

Our main 2012 recommendation was to take profits on utilities and dive into basic materials, especially the mining issues that got beaten up so badly last year. The S&P miners’ subsector is up 20% year to date while utilities are down by 3.5% (both multi-utilities and electrical utilities S&P subcomponents).
The key to all of this [...]

Al-Ahram’s English-language edition reports enormous queues at Egyptian gas stations due to cutbacks in fuel deliveries:
he fuel crisis that has swept Cairo and other Egyptian governorates appears to be rumbling on despite official claims it would ease as early as Tuesday night.
A brief survey of Cairo petrol stations conducted by Ahram Online on Tuesday evening [...]

I took profits on most of my CVX position today and bought emerging market miners on the dip; a lot of number-crunching on the integrated oil producers tells me that they are at best market performers. We are no longer posting our institutional research at www.macrostrategy.com, but today’s analysis of global oil demand, pricing, and [...]

Another way to impose a de facto wealth tax is to sell off national assets to foreigners at distressed prices, for example, shares of the country’s second-largest bank to the national wealth fund of Kazakhstan. Think of Borat in a Donizetti opera, and you’re on the right track. Of course, the sale of Unicredito shares [...]

Prof. Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel Laureate in economics, makes a keen observation in today’s Financial Times about the character of the Mediterranean debt crisis.

In Italy, household wealth, net of debt, soared by one-fifth in 10 years – from 743 per cent of disposable income in 1999 to 883 per cent in 2009, according to [...]

Transparency in bank portfolios is the key to investor confidence; I’ve insisted all along that the chances of repeat of the 2008 Lehman disaster are slim to zero, because most of the dodgy stuff has long been out of US bank portfolios (not so in Europe, whose bank securities should be avoided like the plague [...]

The Turkish stock market will continue to get clobbered in dollar terms; either the central bank continues to hike interest rates, choking off economic activity, or the Turkish lira continues to slide, or both. See today’s “Spengler” column. See also this post from the Financial Times “Beyond Brics” blog. I’ve been negative on Turkey since [...]

Key points:
Our Main Themes for 2012:
· There’s no credit crunch where it matters;
·

The Year of the Rabbit ends in two weeks, but the Energizer Bunny will keep going

China has a soft landing;
· The US maintains slow (but distinctly positive) growth;
· Southern Europe decouples from the [...]