Bill Bonner on The Crack Up Boom: (You see, if you could really get rich by printing more currency, Zimbabweans would all be as rich as Midas, since the Mugabe government runs the presses night and day.)

The Amazon is drying up from Science Line : (a new report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that the Amazon could be on an irreversible course to extinction.)

From The Washington Post - How Cheney gets things done, and how it screws America. Very interesting story to read if you are an America. And it looks like the blueprint for how Howard gets things done in Australia - leaving no fingerprints.

The Bears Stearn crisis story in the UK Daily Telegraph. (Quote: US property writer Paul Muolo described the Bearn Stearns crisis as the “subprime Chernobyl”, saying the bank had created a “cone of silence")

Kissinger linked to two coups in the '70's. (Quote: Nearly 700 pages of highly classified Central Intelligence Agency reports from the 1970's, known collectively as the "Family Jewels," are slated for public release today.)

Is Cheney part of the executive branch?: (Quote: "Perhaps next he will say he is not subject to the laws of gravity either. He will just float away to some undisclosed location," said Ana Marie Cox, the Washington editor of Time.com.)

Building a justification for a war on Iran: (Quote: The sheer absurdity that Al Qaeda might have advanced capabilities to wage a nuclear attack on America is, nonetheless, pervasive in US media reports.  Moreover, numerous drills and exercises, simulating a terrorist attack using nuclear devices, have been conducted in recent years, creating the illusion that "the threat is real")

Interest rates in the UK need to rise: (Sir John Gieve, deputy governor of the Bank of England, cautioned that 'spectacular growth' in borrowing for buyout and private equity deals could endanger the banking system and cause a sharp financial downturn).

The Bears Stearn crisis story in the UK Daily Telegraph. (Quote: US property writer Paul Muolo described the Bearn Stearns crisis as the “subprime Chernobyl”, saying the bank had created a “cone of silence")

Kissinger linked to two coups in the '70's. (Quote: Nearly 700 pages of highly classified Central Intelligence Agency reports from the 1970's, known collectively as the "Family Jewels," are slated for public release today.)

Is Cheney part of the executive branch?: (Quote: "Perhaps next he will say he is not subject to the laws of gravity either. He will just float away to some undisclosed location," said Ana Marie Cox, the Washington editor of Time.com.)

Building a justification for a war on Iran: (Quote: The sheer absurdity that Al Qaeda might have advanced capabilities to wage a nuclear attack on America is, nonetheless, pervasive in US media reports.  Moreover, numerous drills and exercises, simulating a terrorist attack using nuclear devices, have been conducted in recent years, creating the illusion that "the threat is real")

Interest rates in the UK need to rise: (Sir John Gieve, deputy governor of the Bank of England, cautioned that 'spectacular growth' in borrowing for buyout and private equity deals could endanger the banking system and cause a sharp financial downturn).

I was invited to the dinner last night for the Star V Conference. This is the conference where APEC Region countries look at risk and business continuity.

The after dinner speech was given by John Merkovsky, from Marsh USA. Really fascinating talk and a very interesting guy. I had a chance to talk with him briefly after the dinner. Bear in mind this is a company whose fundamental premise, as an insurer, is to understand risk and insure against it; who consult on this stuff to the World Economic Forum among other things.

He talked about the big challenges in risk being global warming, nuclear proliferation, etc. Then went on to talk about two key issues that are key. One is that companies who look for guidance on these things often miss the critical issue: Reputional Risk. He mentioned a number of case studies including problems that Jamba Juice had prior to their IPO, and how by focusing on the reputational risk they not only solved the problem but also increased sales.

The other big one was the concept that 'threat' and 'risk' are really quite different. By focusing on threats such as global warming, companies can get bogged down in a rat's nest of little things where it is impossible to cover everything. The real issue is where and what the specific risk is. His example was a company that he consults to that has huge quantities of products being shipped via the port of Shanghai and is concerned about impact from global warming on supply chain. They were focusing on the threat of this rather than solving the risk problems.

Really interesting to get a glimpse of another part of the business ecosystem that I don't often look at these days.

Oil prices are heading north.

None of us have seen any real increase like the sort of prices we have ahead of us.

The International Energy Agency, which monitors oil markets on behalf of industrialized nations, is forecasting average global oil demand of 86.1 million barrels a day this year, up 2 percent from last year. That is twice as fast as the 0.9% growth recorded in 2006, compared with 2005.

Demand is expected to accelerate further in the fourth quarter to 88 million barrels a day, an unprecedented quarterly volume and up 2.6 million barrels a day from the year-earlier period. In the second quarter, global oil demand already has risen at a 1.7% rate, more than double the 0.8% a year ago, according to forecasts and data compiled by the IEA.

In this country we clearly need to have a fund to support whistleblowers.

Just today a customs official who told the press about how lax security was, was found guilty of giving away secrets. The public needed to know this. The government needed to be found guilty. Not the person trying to help fix the problem. Hopefully News Limited and Fairfax will work together to maintain press freedoms and to help support whistleblowers who work for government agencies.

If not we had better admit that we are in a police state run by Howard and his friends.

The new buzz word: Agflation.

Heard on the radio, told in the papers, this is the future. And why not? We have climate change totally disrupting all aspects of Australian agriculture. So not really surprising.

Here is what it means. It is all about bio-fuels:

On the one hand the growing affluence of millions of people in China and India is creating a surge in demand for food - the rising populations are not content with their parents' diet and demand more meat. On the other, is the use of food crops as a source of energy in place of oil, the so-called bio-fuels boom.

As these two forces combine they are setting off warning bells around the world.

Rice prices are climbing worldwide. Butter prices in Europe have spiked by 40 per cent in the past year. Wheat futures are trading at their highest level for a decade. Global soybean prices have risen by a half. Pork prices in China are up 20 per cent on last year and the food price index in India was up by 11 per cent year on year. In Mexico there have been riots in response to a 60 per cent rise in the cost of tortillas.

It has even revived discussion of the work of the 18th-century British thinker Robert Malthus. He predicted that the growth of the world's population would outstrip its ability to produce food, leading to mass starvation.

So far in Britain we have been insulated from the early effects of these price rises by the competitive nature of our retail system. But the supermarkets cannot shield us for long. The European Commission no longer has reserves to help cushion its citizens. Its mountains of unsold butter and meat and its lake of powdered milk have disappeared after reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy.

Then there is corn. While relatively little corn is eaten directly it is of pivotal importance to the food economy as so much of it is consumed indirectly. The milk, eggs, cheese, butter, chicken, beef, ice cream and yoghurt in the average fridge is all produced using corn and the price of every one of these is influenced by the price of corn. In effect, our fridges are full of corn.

In the past 12 months the global corn price has doubled. The constant aim of agriculture is to produce enough food to carry us over to the next harvest. In six of the past seven years, we have used more grain worldwide than we have produced. As a result world grain reserves - or carryover stocks - have dwindled to 57 days. This is the lowest level of grain reserves in 34 years.

The story in the Financial Times really tells it all.

It is not just that World trade talks collapse.... The Indian trade minister explained why, according to the FT:

I came across an essay by Walter Wink about the Myth Of Redemptive Violence.

Tremendous piece of analysis that explains so much of the problem of the politics of our era. Understanding the rationale for the 'why' in our society should help us understand the 'how' to change it - a huge undertaking in and of itself.