by ilene - February 27th, 2010 10:46 am
Courtesy of Business Insider

(AP) A tsunami warning was in effect for Hawaii Saturday following a massive earthquake that struck central Chile.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center also issued a tsunami advisory for the coast of California and an Alaskan coastal area from Kodiak to Attu islands.
The first waves were expected to arrive in Hawaii at 11:19 a.m. Saturday (4:19 p.m. EST).
The center said a tsunami has been generated that could cause damage along coastlines of all islands in the Hawaii. It said a tsunami in California and Alaska was possible.
The Ewa Beach, Hawaii-based center called for "urgent action to protect lives and property" in Hawaii, which is among 53 nations and territories subject to tsunami warnings.
"The main thing is we want everyone to take this event seriously," said Charles McCreery, director of the center.
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Courtesy of Vincent Fernando at Clusterstock/Business Insider

Chile was struck by an enormous 8.8 magnitude quake Saturday, which was luckily 200 miles from Santiago.
Still, tsunami warnings have been issued on the coast:
Reuters:
A tsunami warning was issued for Chile and Peru by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, and a tsunami watch was issued for Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Antarctica.
Soon after, the U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had generated a tsunami that may have been destructive along the Chilean coast near the epicenter. The USGS said the earthquake struck 56 miles northeast of the city of Concepcion at a depth of 34 miles at 3:34 a.m./1:34 EST.
Its magnitude was initially reported at 8.3 then 8.5. An earthquake of magnitude 8 or over is classified as a "great" earthquake that can cause "tremendous damage," according to the USGS website.
The earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince on January 12 was rated at magnitude 7.0.
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Tags: Chile, Earthquake, Economy, Hawaii, International, regulation, Tsunami
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by ilene - January 29th, 2010 8:41 pm
Courtesy of Random Roger
The idea for this post was my initial and apparently incorrect reading of the Jeremy Grantham letter. On first read I thought he was saying expressly the market is very complicated these days and while he may have have been implying as much, I did not find the comment as I remembered it on the second read through. Whether he implied it or not, I will say it; the markets right now are especially complicated and appear to be facing fundamental things that it has either never faced or not faced in modern times.
We as investors need to assess it all and try to navigate through.
The list of risk factors is too long to come up with all of them off the top but things on my mind this week (many of which have been newsworthy this week) have included many countries facing ratings downgrades and having to answer questions about whether they are candidates for default, just about every US state has serious deficit problems, it is possible the GDP growth seen thus far might be all from stimulus, pension funds are looking back at a decade where US stocks dropped a couple of percent per year but they need growth of 7-8% per year, there are conflicting messages coming from Washington (not unique), US budget deficits will be starting for with the letter T for years, creating enough jobs to get the U-6 number down to something decent seems like a mathematical impossibility, it seems like a mathematical certainty that home foreclosures must rise a lot, and there are more.
The point of the above the paragraph is not to lay out a bearish argument for why stocks should go down because most of these issues have been around since before the rally started last March. The above paragraph does point out the complexities that we face today. When the market goes up they build the wall of worry for the market to climb and when the market goes down they become fundamental causes for a "big" decline.
That the same factors can be both the wall of worry and a reason to go down is not new but the current events are collectively a little more complicated than I think we are used to.
A…

Tags: Chile, Israel, Jeremy Grantham letter, Norway
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