地球の裏側より．．

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高地クスコにて

イスラエル軍ガザ空爆、１５５人死亡

印パ、ソマリア沖、ギリシャ暴動、タイ空港封鎖等の政治的行動が新たなる時代を表している。

【カイロ＝福島利之】イスラエル軍は２７日、イスラム原理主義組織ハマスが実効支配するパレスチナ自治区ガザに激しい空爆を加え、パレスチナの医療関係者がロイター通信に語ったところによると、少なくとも１５５人が死亡、２００人以上が負傷した。 　同通信によると、今回の攻撃によるパレスチナ人の死者は、一日の犠牲者数としては１９８０年代の第１次インティファーダ（対イスラエル蜂起）以降最多。 空爆後、ガザの武装勢力がイスラエル南部にロケット弾を撃ち込み、イスラエル人１人が死亡した。ハマスなど各勢力は「報復」を宣言する声明を出しており、 交戦拡大は必至の情勢だ。 　イスラエル軍は２７日、声明を発表し、標的はハマスの「（武装勢力）訓練所や武器庫」だとした上で、「必要があれば、攻撃を強化する」と警告した。現地 の報道などによると、イスラエル軍はガザ地区内の警察施設などに約３０発のミサイルを撃ち込んだ。地元警察幹部を含めハマスの治安部隊関係者らが多数犠牲 になった模様だ。 　今回の空爆はハマスなどパレスチナ武装勢力によるロケット弾攻撃に対する報復とみられる。イスラエルのリブニ外相は２５日、エジプトのムバラク大統領との会談後、「（ハマスによるガザ支配は）もう十分だ」と語っていた。 　今年６月に発効したイスラエルとハマスとの停戦は、今月１９日にハマスが終了を宣言。以降、ハマスがイスラエル南部に向け、ロケット弾を発射する一方、イスラエル軍は空爆を加えるなど衝突はエスカレート。これまでに少なくとも６人のパレスチナ人の民兵らが死亡していた。

最終更新:12月27日23時52分

流通業危機

確かダイエー、そごうもこのような感じでしたね。。

More Bankruptcies: Corporate-turnaround experts and bankruptcy lawyers are predicting a wave of retailer bankruptcies early next year, after being contacted by big and small retailers either preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection or scrambling to avoid that fate.

Analysts estimate that from about 10% to 26% of all retailers are in financial distress and in danger of filing for Chapter 11. AlixPartners LLP, a Michigan-based turnaround consulting firm, estimates that 25.8% of 182 large retailers it tracks are at significant risk of filing for bankruptcy or facing financial distress in 2009 or 2010. In the previous two years, the firm had estimated 4% to 7% of retailers then tracked were at a high risk for filing.
...
Store Closings: The International Council of Shopping Centers estimates that 148,000 stores will close in 2008, the most since 2001, and it predicts that there will be an additional 73,000 closures in the first half of 2009.

January is usually the busiest month for retailer bankruptcies

印パ緊張高まる

金はこれを材料に上昇
Pakistan moves troops to Indian boarder

また、同時に
「中国艦艇３隻、海賊対策でソマリアへ…初の軍事力行使作戦」
インドへの牽制にもなるか。。

この中で北朝鮮において何らかの事変が起きた場合、どのように米中が対応するか。。

１月は年初から波乱含みに。。

ほう。。すごい

冬休みの計画を立てている時にであったブログです。何気なく読んでいたら、なんとここ１年間世界旅行をしていた夫婦の旅行記でした。ガッツと幸運のある日本人夫婦です！
これから辺境への旅行を検討されていく方にはお勧め。
我々はこうした旅行にはならないと思いますが行く方面はここよりはるか南です！

Quality!

ようこそ！

最近アメリカで復活しています。
彼女の人気と景気とに因果関係があるような気がするので、今度調べます。

11° F | 2° F
-12° C | -17° C

地球上のすべての飛行機の動き。。

影武者？？

年の割に素早い。。護衛がいない。。

2° F | -8° F
-17° C | -22° C

続き。。 ほー

NY Postによると野村を通して投資家が引っかかっている可能性がありますね。。

目論見書　米ドル５０本　
目論見書　ユーロ３０本

ともに野村証券が元本保証

他にもいろいろとあるようです。
仮にどの投資家も元本保証で販売していたとしたら、金融市場に対する信用が大きく揺らぐことでしょう。ただし、このニュースにおいてどの程度の被害が実際もたらされて、市場に織り込まれているのかは正直言って分かりません。すでに主要国の金融関係者には報告されていた可能性もあり。
ーーーーーーーーー

A number of respectable institutions, from banks to firms that manage funds of hedge funds, will likely be damaged by yesterday's stunning revelations.

Groups known to have worked with Madoff in the past include alternative-asset manager Fairfield Greenwich Group, the Nomura Bank of Japan, and Swiss asset-management firm NPB New Private Bank.

Sources tell The Post that Madoff managed money for Fairfield Greenwich through a $7 billion hedge fund called Fairfield Sentry, which Nomura and NPB offered to clients.

According to a document obtained by The Post, the fund reported earnings of 4.5 percent at the end of October. Another document says the fund has a 15-year track record of producing 11 percent returns.

Fairfield Greenwich officials declined to comment.

Madoff's trading strategy, known as "split-strike conversion," has raised eyebrows in the past, sources said. The complex strategy involves trading in and out of large-cap stocks and buying put options on baskets of stocks.

"I think a lot of people already were very suspicious," said one hedge-fund executive. "If you look at the performance, it looks too good to be true. And if it looks too good to be true, chances are it is."

With Mark DeCambre

５兆円ですよね。。。この詐欺事件の被害額。。第２のプリンストン債ですか。。

Prominent Trader Accused of Defrauding Clients

By DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ZACHERY KOUWE

Published: December 11, 2008

On Wall Street, his name is legendary. With money he had made as a lifeguard on the beaches of Long Island, he built a trading powerhouse that had prospered for more than four decades. At age 70, he had become an influential spokesman for the traders who are the hidden gears of the marketplace.

But on Thursday morning, this consummate trader, Bernard L. Madoff, was arrested at his Manhattan home by federal agents who accused him of running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme — perhaps the largest in Wall Street’s history.

Regulators have not yet verified the scale of the fraud. But the criminal complaint filed against Mr. Madoff on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan reports that he estimated the losses at $50 billion. “We are alleging a massive fraud — both in terms of scope and duration,” said Linda Chatman Thomsen, director of the enforcement division at the Securities and Exchange Commission. “We are moving quickly and decisively to stop the fraud and protect remaining assets for investors.”

Andrew M. Calamari, an associate director for enforcement in the S.E.C.’s regional office in New York, said the case involved “a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions.”

According to his lawyers, Mr. Madoff was released on a $10 million bond. “Bernie Madoff is a longstanding leader in the financial services industry,” said Daniel Horwitz, one of his lawyers. “He will fight to get through this unfortunate set of events.”

Mr. Madoff’s brother and business colleague, Peter Madoff, declined to comment on the case or discuss its implications for the Madoff firm, which at one point was the largest market maker on the electronic Nasdaq market, regularly operating as both a buyer and seller of a host of widely traded securities. The firm employed hundreds of traders.

There was some worry on Wall Street that Mr. Madoff’s fall would shake more foundations than his own.

According to the most recent federal filings, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the firm he founded in 1960, operated more than two dozen funds overseeing $17 billion.

These funds have been widely marketed to wealthy investors, hedge funds and other institutional customers for more than a decade, although an S.E.C. filing in the case said the firm reported having 11 to 23 clients at the beginning of this year.

At the request of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal judge appointed a receiver on Thursday evening to secure the Madoff firm’s overseas accounts and warned the firm not to move any assets until he had ruled on whether to freeze the assets.

A hearing on that request is scheduled for Friday.

Regulators said they hoped to have a clearer picture of the losses facing investors by that court hearing.

“We have 16 examiners on site all day and through the night poring over the records,” said Mr. Calamari of the S.E.C.

The Madoff funds attracted investors with the promise of high returns and low fees. One of Mr. Madoff’s more prominent funds, the Fairfield Sentry fund, reported having $7.3 billion in assets in October and claimed to have paid more than 11 percent interest each year through its 15-year track record.

Competing hedge fund managers have wondered privately for years how Mr. Madoff generated such high returns, in bull markets and bear, given the generally low-yielding investment strategies he described to his clients.

“The numbers were too good to be true, for too long,” said Girish Reddy, a managing director at Prisma Partners, an investment firm that invests in hedge funds. “And the supporting infrastructure was weak.” Mr. Reddy said his firm had looked at the Madoff funds but decided against investing in them because their performance was too consistently positive, even in times when the market was incredibly volatile.

But the essential drama is a personal one — one laid out in the dry language of a criminal complaint by Lev L. Dassin, the acting United States attorney in Manhattan, and a regulatory lawsuit filed by the S.E.C. According to those documents, the first alarm bells rang at the firm on Tuesday, when Mr. Madoff told a senior executive he wanted to pay his employees their annual bonuses in December, two months early.

Just days earlier, Mr. Madoff had told another senior executive he was struggling to raise cash to cover about $7 billion in requested withdrawals from his clients, and he had appeared “to have been under great stress in the prior weeks,” according to the S.E.C. complaint.

Related

So on Wednesday, the senior executive visited Mr. Madoff’s office, maintained on a separate floor with records kept under lock and key, and asked for an explanation.

Instead, Mr. Madoff invited the two executives to his Manhattan apartment that evening. When they joined him there, he told them that his money-management business was “all just one big lie” and “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme.”

The senior employees understood him to be saying that he had for years been paying returns to certain investors out of the cash received from other investors.

In that conversation, according to the criminal complaint, Mr. Madoff “stated that he was ‘finished,’ that he had ‘absolutely nothing.’ ”

By this account, Mr. Madoff told the executives he intended to surrender to the authorities in about a week but first wanted to distribute approximately $200 million to $300 million to “certain selected employees, family and friends.”

On Thursday morning, however, he was arrested on a single count of securities fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $5 million.

According to the S.E.C., Mr. Madoff confessed to an F.B.I. agent that there was “no innocent explanation” for his behavior and he expected to go to jail. He had lost money on his trades, he told the agent, and had “paid investors with money that wasn’t there.”

Although not a household name, Mr. Madoff’s firm has played a significant role in the structure of Wall Street for decades, both in traditional stock trading and in the development of newer electronic networks for trading equities and derivatives.

In building those new trading networks, his firm had formed partnerships with some of the largest brokerage businesses on Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.

Mr. Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in 1960 and liked to tell interviewers about earning his initial stake by working as a lifeguard at city beaches and installing underground sprinkler systems.

By the early 1980s, his firm was one of the largest independent trading operations in the securities industry. The company had around $300 million in assets in 2000 at the height of the Internet bubble and ranked among the top trading and securities firms in the nation.

Mr. Madoff ran the business with several family members, including his brother Peter, his nephew Charles, his niece Shana and his sons Mark and Andrew.

本日の感動

Tonight

Not as cold. Mostly cloudy. A 20 percent chance of snow in the evening. Lows around 15. South winds 10 to 15 mph.

９０円割れ

いよいよ円の独歩高ですね。満月の夜にこうした出来事が起こるのは単なる偶然の一致でしょうか？

仕事が入ったため

忙しくしております。今週は零下１０度以下の毎日になりそうです。