El Filosofo Liberal

Solo se dona el 5% de lo recomendado. Fabiola Czubaj LA NACION Es difícil que transcurra más de una o dos semanas sin que llegue un e-mail en el que se solicitan con urgencia 10, 50 y hasta 120 dadores de sangre para que un familiar o un desconocido puedan ser operados o transfundidos. "Quienes donan sangre ayudan a cientos de personas. Donar sangre es dar vida", recuerda el texto del mensaje con el que la semana pasada el hospital Garrahan, de esta capital, solicitó a la población 60 donantes diarios para sus pequeños pacientes víctimas de accidentes graves, con leucemias o anemias crónicas o que deben ser trasplantados del corazón, pulmón, riñón o médula ósea. La Argentina cuenta con apenas el 5 por ciento de los 800.000 donantes voluntarios que debería tener para asegurar la disponibilidad de sangre en todo el país. Y aunque existen varias iniciativas exitosas, son aisladas, lo que impide contar con aquella cantidad que, como ha recomendado la Organización Mundial de la Sa

By Kurt Kasun May 09, 2008 http://www.greenfaucet.com/ http://www.greenfaucet.com/the-market/trapped-in-old-paradigms King Dollar is coming back with a vengeance, threatening to thump commodities, offering to lift the U.S. out of recession, and promising to restore the investment primacy of U.S. equities. On this rallying cry of the desperate blind-eyed optimist crowd (who have been wrong for the last seven years), I wish to make two points: First, the U.S. dollar's rally will be short-lived and capped at a resistance level which once served as support for 36 years! Second, the first point is becoming increasingly irrelevant because the rally in commodities is evolving more into a supply/demand and world fiat currency story than a USD story. This is especially true since the rest of the world is beginning to eschew the USD as the world's reserve currency and adopt their own inflationary, currency-debasing policies. Analysts have shown that, thus far in the commodity rally, be

Robert Kiyosaki Monday, November 24, 2008, 12:00AM How did we get into the current financial mess? Great question. Turmoil in the Making In 1910, seven men held a secret meeting on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. It's estimated that those seven men represented one-sixth of the world's wealth. Six were Americans representing J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the U.S. government. One was a European representing the Rothschilds and Warburgs. In 1913, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank was created as a direct result of that secret meeting. Interestingly, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank isn't federal, there are no reserves, and it's not a bank. Those seven men, some American and some European, created this new entity, commonly referred to as the Fed, to take control of the banking system and the money supply of the United States. In 1944, a meeting in Bretton Woods, N.H., led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While the stated purpose

by Andy Kessler Friday, November 21, 2008 The Wall Street Journal Down in the morning, up in the afternoon. Or is it the other way around? The topsy-turvy stock market is tough to read. In the last year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has briefly been over 13,000 and below 8,000. The past month has felt like the Cyclone roller coaster on Brooklyn's Coney Island -- lots of ups and downs, the whole rickety thing feeling like it's going to crash at any minute. Great investors are taught to listen to the market. Each tick of the tape has something to say about expectations for growth, inflation, policy changes and looming recessions. The stock market is like a giant mass of pulsing plasma doing price discovery and a game of hot potato, getting stocks into the correct hands with the right risk profile. It's way too big for any one person to manipulate, let alone touch directly. Instead, millions of us provide input with our buying and selling decisions. When it's at its mo

By CONRAD de AENLLE Published: November 21, 2008 WHEN crude oil sailed above $140 a barrel, analysts forecast even higher prices, virtually without dissent. Four months have passed, crude has fallen below $50, and now a rally generally seems to be considered almost out of the question. Betting against the consensus by selling energy stocks would have paid off several months ago, and the opposite play, equally contrarian, might be profitable now. Shares of many suppliers of oil and natural gas have lost half their value or more in the stock market’s race to the bottom, and may be good buys. Robb J. Parlanti, an analyst and fund manager at Turner Investment Partners, expects gas producers to be the biggest beneficiaries if energy prices recover. He emphasizes the “if,” however, and advises investors to “stick with high-quality companies that are good to own even if the market doesn’t come back.” Those he has in mind include XTO Energy, Range Resources , Southwestern Energy , Petrohawk En

Doug Kass 11/17/08 - 12:00 PM EST This blog post originally appeared on RealMoney Silver on Nov. 17 at 8:03 a.m. EST. For nearly a decade, a surplus of cash has led to a shortage of common sense in the lending and borrowing of capital, and the markets are now in disarray as a financial hurricane has wreaked havoc upon the world's economies. In a haze of uncertainty, market participants' visions of our economic future remain cloudy. That uncertainty and the loss of investor confidence and liquidity are manifested in historic intraday swings, suggesting that investors see a very wide range of possible economic outcomes. A crisis 10 to 15 years in the making does not get fixed overnight. There are going to be difficult days ahead, but, as I have noted , there are tentative signs of improvement. For example, the actions taken by the U.S. and other nations are beginning to have an impact. Though credit remains dear, credit markets are beginning to thaw. Businesses are slowly gainin

1. We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, held an initial meeting in Washington on November 15, 2008, amid serious challenges to the world economy and financial markets. We are determined to enhance our cooperation and work together to restore global growth and achieve needed reforms in the world’s financial systems. 2. Over the past months our countries have taken urgent and exceptional measures to support the global economy and stabilize financial markets. These efforts must continue. At the same time, we must lay the foundation for reform to help to ensure that a global crisis, such as this one, does not happen again. Our work will be guided by a shared belief that market principles, open trade and investment regimes, and effectively regulated financial markets foster the dynamism, innovation, and entrepreneurship that are essential for economic growth, employment, and poverty reduction. Root Causes of the Current Crisis 3. During a period of strong global growth, growing capital f

The Wall Street Journal - Opinion NOVEMBER 14, 2008 As committees to save the world go, Saturday's Washington confab of the Group of 20 world leaders may be the most poorly timed in history. In their wisdom, the politicians have decided to meet to solve the world's financial troubles smack in the middle of a U.S. Presidential transition. But thank heaven, at least the Saudis and Brazilians will be there. For some world leaders, this timing is part of the appeal. They know President Bush is on his way out and at a low popular ebb, while Barack Obama hasn't even named a Treasury Secretary. From the safe harbor of Chicago, the President-elect is dispatching a pair of supporters with no great experience in global finance -- former Congressman Jim Leach and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- to attend on his behalf. He is right to keep his distance before he has his own economic team in place. All of which makes the meeting a wonderful forum for other national leade

The Wall Street Journal - Opinion NOVEMBER 14, 2008 You may have heard about Argentina's plan to nationalize private retirement accounts. Some Democrats on Capitol Hill are inspired, and with their big election victory they may get the chance to test Peronist ideas in America. Meet Congressmen George Miller and Jim McDermott, who are eager to change the way Americans save for their golden years. They'll also be powerbrokers in the next Congress. Mr. Miller, who came in with the Class of 1974 from California, chairs the House Education and Labor Committee. Mr. McDermott, who has represented Seattle the past two decades, runs a House Ways and Means subcommittee on income security and family support. Before Election Day, the Congressmen began to target the $3 trillion in 401(k) accounts held by about 60% of Americans. Mr. Miller called the system "an inadequate vehicle" that "has not been terribly successful" in encouraging retirement savings. He wants a "

Commentary by Caroline Baum Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) Three months ago, the world was running out of oil. Seriously. I kid you not. Everywhere you turned, you heard whispers that the day of petroleum reckoning was at hand. Now there's too much oil, prodding OPEC to cut production targets for the first time in two years. Last week, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, confronted with the halving of oil prices since July, announced a 1.5 million barrel-a-day cut in output. World markets greeted the news of reduced oil supply by pushing prices down further. Crude oil fell $3.69 a barrel Friday to $64.15. Yesterday, oil dropped another 93 cents to $63.22, a 17-month low. How quickly things change. Or do they? All speculative bubbles have a kernel of truth behind them to justify their existence. This time around it was China and India. These emerging Asian giants were gobbling up all the commodities the world could produce to fuel their rapid industrialization. It wasn't tha

By WARREN E. BUFFETT Op-Ed Contributor Published: Omaha, October 16, 2008 THE financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary. So ... I’ve been buying American stocks. This is my personal account I’m talking about, in which I previously owned nothing but United States government bonds. (This description leaves aside my Berkshire Hathaway holdings, which are all committed to philanthropy.) If prices keep looking attractive, my non-Berkshire net worth will soon be 100 percent in United States equities. Why? A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leverage

By Andy Serwer and Allan Sloan Time, Thursday, Sep. 18, 2008 If you're having a little trouble coping with what seems to be the complete unraveling of the world's financial system, you needn't feel bad about yourself. It's horribly confusing, not to say terrifying; even people like us, with a combined 65 years of writing about business, have never seen anything like what's going on. Some of the smartest, savviest people we know — like the folks running the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board — find themselves reacting to problems rather than getting ahead of them. It's terra incognita, a place no one expected to visit. Every day brings another financial horror show, as if Stephen King were channeling Alan Greenspan to produce scary stories full of negative numbers. One weekend, the Federal Government swallows two gigantic mortgage companies and dumps more than $5 trillion — yes, with a t — of the firms' debt onto taxpayers, nearly doubling the amount