E Busy Monday

In the 19^th century,downstairs (the servants) used to complain if they were forced to dine on salmon the master had fished from the nearby rivers of Devonshire more than once a week. Salmon was cheap but boring and tasteless at least as prepared in the servants’ hall.

I fear something similar will happen globally when the new super-sized frankenfish approved by the US Food & Drug Administration hit the market. The bigger fish (4x as long and about 10x as heavy) are created by CRISPR gene insertion. There will be more fish to satisfy the world’s need for protein, but will it be appetizing?

The week of many close of month reports on global economies began with a big bite of bad-good news. The inflation rate in Italy fell by 0.5% in November after rising in October. In the world of today, central banks want there to be more inflation to prevent the dreaded fall into deflation. While US data are not yet out, the 2016 social security payments have been set at a level based on zero inflation too. The US consumer price index is flat to negative. The only places where you can see inflation is in asset prices, ranging from modern art to Manhattan or Cape Cod real estate.

One bit of good news on the financial regulatory area. It now appears that the eleven Eurozone countries planning a Tobin tax on financial transactions are too disunited to produce a program by the December 30 deadline set by the EU. The issue is which transactions are to be taxed: stocks, public or private sector bonds, currencies, options, futures, all of them, some of them? Austria’s finance minister Hans Joerg Schelling, who has some other problems over the failure of the politically plugged-in State Bank of Carinthia, set the deadline a couple of years ago but the taxing countries are in disarray now, few more than FM Schelling.

*The Samarco iron ore mine partners, BHP and Vale face a mounting wall of fines and lawsuits over the tailing dam disaster of reais 7.2 bn to 20 bn (the larger figure is equal to US$5.2 bn). This is addition to an earlier fine of Rs 250 mn and well above the provisions the partners created so far to cover costs of $1 bn.