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Up to a point, a falling currency is a blessing. After that, it's a curse. The dollar has fallen 16% against a basket of its trading partners' currencies over the past three years. In theory, that should, with time, make U.S.-made goods more competitive with those made abroad, boosting U.S. growth and employment. But a growing chorus warns that the U.S.'s gaping budget and trade deficits will lead to a crisis in which the dollar falls much more sharply, driving up interest rates and squeezing the economy. There are plenty of troubling precedents...

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Emerging market shares trading in New York were struggling to get a clear direction early Thursday afternoon in thinly traded volumes ahead of the holidays. Most Latin American stocks were heading south except for some Brazilian ones, and among Asian shares, Indonesia and Taiwan were making moderate gains. Traders said stocks here were generally tracking their domestic counterparts. Meanwhile, Russia's biggest shares were posting substantial gains, with the country's largest mobile operator Mobile Telesystems (MBT), or MTS, rising 4.1% to $123.91 after Germany's Deutsche Telekom (DT) said it would sell a 12% stake in the company. The...

Has anyone on this site ever offered a Free Book Exchange????? I just received "Unfit For Command". When I am finished with this book, I would love to send it to someone else who I know would enjoy it. I have an number of other books, both liberal and conservative, that I would love to pass on to others. Has anyone ever done this on the FR site??? Is there an interest??????

It looked like Google’s stockmarket flotation might be derailed at the last minute by an interview in Playboy magazine that seemed to contravene listing rules. However, the Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly given it the go-ahead, and the search-engine company could be valued at as much as $36 billion when its shares start trading later this week. Is it worth anything like that? GOOGLE’S founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have always had an air of niceness about them: after all, Google was the first company to promise “not to be evil” in the prospectus for its initial public...

Ken Lay of Enron Indicted and Arrested By Andrew L. Jaffee, July 8, 2004 Home   Search   Forum   Terms Enron’s ex-Chairman of the Board has been indicted and arrested on charges connected with his former company’s implosion in 2001. Corporate executives at Enron engaged in all sorts of financial manipulations to pump up the company’s stock price. They created complex “partnerships” to hide company debt from shareholders. In 1998, Enron’s share price was at about $20. By 2000, it hit $90. By 2001, the company’s stock was worthless. Enron’s collapse wiped out billions in shareholder value and employee pensions. Democratic Presidential hopeful John...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) - A convicted money smuggler was a key fund-raiser for an Islamic charity he knew financed terrorism, and once used an airport bathroom to secretly deliver $10,000 to the group, prosecutors allege.</p> <p>Alaa Al-Saadawi later "defied logic" by telling investigators he gave the $10,000 to a member of the Global Relief Foundation in a bathroom stall at Chicago's O'Hare Airport because he was "scared of gangsters," according to papers filed in federal court in Brooklyn.</p>

Administrators of e-mail systems based on Microsoft's Exchange might have spammers using their servers to send unsolicited bulk e-mail under their noses, a consultant warned this week. Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard University junior and president of consulting company Think Computer, published a white paper Thursday detailing the problem, discovered when a client's server was found to be sending spam. Greenspan's research concluded that Exchange 5.5 and 2000 can be used by spammers to send anonymous e-mail. He says even though software Microsoft provides on its site certifies that the server is secure, it's not. "If the guest account is enabled...

By a slim majority of only one vote, and after a full-day discussion, the Cabinet approved the exchange of prisoners with Hizbullah this afternoon. Terrorists who murdered civilians will not be released. "You all know what the main issue of today's meeting is, so there's no need to add words on the importance of the decision." So said Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the start of this morning's Cabinet session, which dealt exclusively with the prisoner exchange agreement with Hizbullah. The stakes are high: the return of Elchanan Tenenbaum and the proper burial of three IDF soldiers, and on the...

<p>FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) — Ken Leary and Jane LeBlond got their marriage off to a running start. The couple took a break during the Equinox Marathon to exchange vows, then crossed the finish line together. "We wanted something that meant something to both of us," Leary said of the decision to marry during the race Saturday.</p>

First it was French wines. Then French fries. Now it's French exchange students who are getting the cold shoulder from American families still smarting over France's opposition to the war in Iraq. "I start talking about exchange programs and they say, `Great.' And when I say they're all from France, end of conversation." She finally became so exasperated that she drafted an open letter to prospective hosts that was more cri de coeur than letters from the lovelorn. "Are we so self-serving that we've lost touch with the true meaning of America?" it went on. "Are our lives so busy...

After years of urging others to reform economies, Washington changes tactics LONDON The Bush administration, unable to jawbone Europe and Japan into helping it stimulate a sluggish global economy, has decided to let its money do the talking. . That, analysts say, is the underlying message in the move by the U.S. Treasury to drop the ‘‘strong dollar’’ mantra that had been a hallmark of U.S. economic policy since the mid-1990s. . Since the mid-90s, the United States has accounted for about two-thirds of global economic growth, estimates Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, as a strong dollar helped...

Iran exchanged the bodies of 83 Iraqi soldiers for 45 of its own troops killed during its 1980-1988 war with Iraq, in the first such transaction since before the US-led war on Baghdad, the official IRNA news agency reported. The remains were exchanged by the International Committee of the Red Cross at Shalamsheh border post, 10 kilometers (six miles) east of Iraq's southern port of Basra, the head of the search committee for missing soldiers, Mir-Feysal Baqerzadeh, told IRNA. Press reports said Tehran recently refused a British offer to return the remains of dozens of Iranians found in southern Iraq,...

At the heart of the road map is a good idea - place Israel and the Palestinians in a tunnel and let them gradually, cautiously, and firmly work their way toward the unavoidable division of the country. Two states for two nations. However, when it came to translating this correct concept into specific steps, something not so good happened to the road map. It got severed from the outlines of the land within which it is supposed to be carried out. The map lost any connection to what has been learned here about the local topography in the past three...

Having slogged her way through Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, or maybe just some of it, a correspondent asked me if I really believed that the consent-and-exchange society I advocate could possibly work in a Third World country. I answered, yes, of course, and I told her it would work just fine, quickly deliver the goods, peace and prosperity. Indeed, I said, you could see the merits of a free and peaceful economy much more clearly in some benighted backwater of the world than anywhere in the developed world. Mere assertion isn't persuasive, so I started considering how I could dramatize...

Having slogged her way through Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, or maybe just some of it, a correspondent asked me if I really believed that the consent-and-exchange society I advocate could possibly work in a Third World country. I answered, yes, of course, and I told her it would work just fine, quickly deliver the goods, peace and prosperity. Indeed, I said, you could see the merits of a free and peaceful economy much more clearly in some benighted backwater of the world than anywhere in the developed world. Mere assertion isn't persuasive, so I started considering how I could dramatize...

July 25, 2002 New York exchange seeks second site From James Bone in New York THE New York Stock Exchange, considered a prime target for terrorists, revealed yesterday that it has been scouting sites for a second trading floor away from its famous headquarters on Wall Street. The NYSE was forced to shut down for six days — the longest break since in trading since a bank holiday in 1933 — by the attack on the World Trade Centre, just a few blocks away. The disruption of phone and power service in the area continued to hamper trading even when...

The chief of Lebanon's Hizbullah denied reports that German mediators had proposed an exchange of an Israeli held by his movement for 100 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners. "I only heard of the exchange ... through the media, although I have been following the case from the start," Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told Al-Manar, Hizbullah's television station. "This offer has never been put to us in the negotiations. It is something new which we have read about in the newspapers, and the German delegation has not conveyed any such offer to us," he said. Nasrallah aired "these rumors aim to give the...

Friday, 3 May, 2002, 13:21 GMT 14:21 UK Air Miles 'threaten dollar's dominance'Air Miles currently in circulation are said to be worth $500 billion - making them the second biggest "currency" after the dollar.  Air Miles facts American Airlines set up first airline reward scheme 21 years ago, called the "Advantage Travel Programme" "Air Miles" originates from the UK 13 years ago Name now franchised to third parties, including British Airways who has owned the UK Air Miles operation since 1994 Source: Air Miles UK At its current rate of growth the stock of miles could overtake the dollar within...