September 13th, 2011 Newsletter

Dear Friends,

Tangents:

HELLO

A word used in greeting, especially over the telephone

In one guise or another, “hallo,” “halloo,” and “hullo” have been used to solicit attention and signal surprise since the Middle Ages.  Hunters urged on their dogs with “halloo,” and the word was also used to signal a ferryboat captain from across the water.  (Some etymologists say it originated with the Old French Ho lá!, meaning “stop” or “pay attention.”)  As a greeting, “hello” had a gutsy, modern air in the late nineteenth century.  It was sleeker than “Do I get you?,” another early option for those greeting each other over the telephone, and it was more suave than England’s awkward choice, “Are you there?”  “Hello” was “a thorough-bred bulldog, ugly enough to be attractive,” one journalist wrote in 1899.  “It makes courtesy wait upon dispatch, and reminds us that we live in an age when it is necessary to be wide awake.”

  For those who normally spoke only with people to whom they’d been introduced, striking a balance between politesse and wasting time was tricky when greeting faceless strangers over the primitive, buzzing phone lines.  Delays and disconnections exasperated early subscribers.  In the beginning, tough young men working the switchboards in the din and clamor of the lawless central offices, like the Chicago exchange, known as “a howling madhouse,” happily battled complainers.  They were soon replaced by the less abrasive “Hello Girl,” whom we now know as the operator.  She flirted instead of fighting and quickly became a national archetype, known for her honeyed voice and her love of gossip.  In a small town, she’d even tell you the train schedule.

  In the name of efficiency, Hello Girls received elocution lessons after the turn of the century.  Then, in a further attempt to improve service, they were instructed to answer all calls with a curt “Number?”  Callers bristled and the Girls went back to “Hello.”  By the late 1920s, however, some company executives across the country banned the word again, with operators restricted to phrases “Number, please?” and “Thank you.”  “Synthetic courtesy is not soft and sentimental,” opined the New York Times.  “It is hard and virile.”

 Something about “hello” just felt right.  Nevertheless, as late as 1937 the New York telephone company tried to kill it once more, advising subscribers to answer their own phones with only their name, or company name, and recommending above all that callers “avoid such old-fashioned, indefinite and time-wasting words as ‘hello’.”  –from encyclopedia of the Exquisite, Jessica K. Jenkins.

…and I suppose someday, someone will be describing how “Hey” replaced “Hello” sometime around 2010…

Photos of the day 

September 13, 2011

Tuvan shamans participate in a ritual called “Kamlanie” outside the Kyzyl town, the administrative centre of Russia’s Tuva region, south of Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. Eight shamans, members of “The Spirit of Bear” society took part in the traditional ritual. Ilya Naymushin/Reuters.

A sheep painted with the emblem of England’s rugby team looks on at a farm on the outskirts of Dunedin. England will play against Georgia in their Rugby World Cup Pool B match in Dunedin on Sunday. Marcos Brindicci/Reuters.

Market Commentary:

Canada

By Nikolaj Gammeltoft

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) — Canadian stocks rose, breaking a three-day losing streak for the Standard & Poor’s/TSX Composite Index, as oil gained and financial companies rallied amid easing concern about French banks.

Toronto-Dominion Bank, Canada’s second-largest lender by assets, increased 1.7 percent. Bank of Nova Scotia, the third- largest lender, added 1.3 percent. Cenovus Energy Inc. rose 1.9 percent as crude climbed for a second day. Silvercorp Metals Inc., the Chinese silver miner accused of accounting fraud in an anonymous letter last month, fell 20 percent after Carson Block’s Muddy Waters LLC said it was shorting the stock.

The S&P/TSX rose 56.65 points, or 0.5 percent, to 12,205.48 at 4 p.m. Toronto time. The gauge lost 4.5 percent during the previous three days.

“We have a daily risk-on, risk-off trade as the market responds to global news,” Mathieu Roy, a money manager at Louisbourg Investments Inc. in Moncton, New Brunswick, said in a telephone interview. Louisbourg manages about C$1.5 billion ($1.5 billion). “We’re in a nervous trading range driven by macro events happening mostly in Europe.”

The index has slumped 14 percent since April 5 as the European debt crisis worsened. On Sept. 9, three officials with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition said the government is preparing plans to shore up banks in the event that Greece defaults. The officials declined to be named because the deliberations are private.                          

Toronto-Dominion Bank jumped 1.7 percent to C$73.85, while Bank of Nova Scotia surged 1.3 percent to C$51.45. Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s largest lender by assets, rose 0.1 percent to C$46.25. The S&P/TSX Financials Index advanced 0.8 percent while industrial stocks added the most among 10 industries, gaining 1.6 percent.

BNP Paribas SA, France’s biggest bank, and Societe Generale SA rebounded in Paris trading after easing concerns over their access to funding. Societe Generale jumped after Chief Executive Officer Frederic Oudea said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York that the bank’s exposure to European sovereign debt was “manageable” and that it could do without access to U.S. money-market funds.

Cenovus, the country’s fifth-biggest energy company, rallied 1.9 percent to C$31.90. Encana Corp., Canada’s biggest natural gas producer, advanced 1.5 percent to C$22.68.

Crude climbed for a second day in New York on speculation a report tomorrow will show stockpiles dropped in the U.S., the biggest oil consuming country. Natural gas futures gained for the first time in three days as forecasts showed hotter-than- normal weather in the U.S. Midwest and West, boosting demand for the power-plant fuel.                     

Guyana Goldfields Inc. rallied 1.3 percent to C$9.30. The gold explorer with operations in South America was rated “outperform” in new coverage at Credit Suisse Group AG with a price estimate of C$13 a share.

Silvercorp fell 20 percent, the most in seven years, to C$6.20. Lorne Waldman, a spokesman for Vancouver-based Silvercorp, didn’t respond to e-mail and telephone requests for comment. Block of Muddy Waters announced his bearish Silvercorp bet on Twitter today.

Toronto-Dominion Bank reduced its forecast for the Canada’s economic growth this year and next to reflect a U.S. economy that had a deeper recession than previously reported, according to Craig Alexander, the bank’s chief economist.

TD cut its growth forecast for Canada to 2.2 percent this year, from 2.8 percent. It reduced the forecast for next year to 1.9 percent, from 2.5 percent, and raised the 2013 outlook to 2.6 percent, from 2.1 percent.

US

By Rita Nazareth

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) — U.S. stocks rose, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index higher for a second day, as French banks eased concerns over their access to funding and investors watched for signs of progress in taming Europe’s debt crisis.

All 10 main industries in the S&P 500 advanced as gains were led by industrial, raw material and technology companies.

The Dow Jones Transportation Average, a proxy for the U.S. economy, jumped 3.4 percent as airlines rose. Wells Fargo & Co. and Fifth Third Bancorp added more than 1 percent, following a rally in European lenders. Aetna Inc. jumped 5.4 percent as the health insurer said profit will probably beat its forecast.

The S&P 500 increased 0.9 percent to 1,172.87 at 4 p.m. in New York, after falling as much as 0.4 percent. The gauge has risen 1.6 percent in two days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 44.73 points, or 0.4 percent, to 11,105.85 today.

“Stocks are trading on the news of the day and the news was moderately favorable,” Michael Cuggino, who oversees $15 billion at Permanent Portfolio Funds in San Francisco, said in a telephone interview. “While the issues of liquidity and health of the European banking system and the long-term viability of the euro are still out there, today is a day where people are looking beyond that. We’ve had a big correction. Levels really haven’t gotten back to where they were.”

The S&P 500 fell as much as 18 percent from a three-year high on April 29 through Aug. 8 on growing concern over Europe’s debt crisis and an economic slowdown. Since then, the index has risen 4.8 percent.

Global stocks rose as BNP Paribas SA, France’s biggest bank, and Societe Generale SA surged after easing concerns over their access to funding. Societe Generale jumped after Chief Executive Officer Frederic Oudea said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in New York that the bank’s potential losses from European sovereign debt were “manageable” and that it could do without access to U.S. money-market funds.

“For our bank, the exposure to sovereign debt is low, absolutely manageable,” Oudea said. “We have plenty of buffers of liquidity and we are adjusting to the reduction in the money- market fund exposure.”

Stocks briefly trimmed gains after a report that German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Greece should not get any additional aid beyond what has already been agreed upon.

Greece should default on its bonds to stop a deterioration of the economy, said Mario Blejer, a former Bank of England adviser who took the reins of Argentina’s central bank after its 2001 default on $95 billion.                         

“Greece should default, and default big,” Blejer, who was an adviser to Bank of England Governor Mervyn King from 2003 to 2008, said in an interview in Buenos Aires. “You can’t jump over a chasm in two steps.”

The KBW Bank Index added 1.2 percent. Wells Fargo gained 1.1 percent to $24.36. Fifth Third Bancorp rallied 4.2 percent to $10.35.

All 20 stocks in the Dow Jones Transportation Average rose. Delta Air Lines Inc. climbed 8.3 percent to $7.99. United Continental Holdings Inc. advanced 7.4 percent to $19.28.

Aetna rose 5.4 percent to $40.53. Earnings excluding some items this year are now expected to be more than $4.60 to $4.70 a share, the Hartford, Connecticut-based insurer said in a corporate filing today. Demand for medical care continues to be lower than previous expectations, helping to contain costs, Aetna said.

Best Buy Co. sank 6.5 percent to $23.35. The largest consumer electronics retailer reported second-quarter profit that trailed analysts’ estimates and cut its full-year earnings forecast as sales of televisions and mobile phones declined.                        

The S&P 500 may drop below a one-year low reached last month because too few stocks have declined rapidly enough, according to MF Global Inc.

Using an indicator known as the 10-day stochastic, only 3.2 percent of S&P 500 stocks were “oversold” as of Sept. 9, Craig Peskin and John Kolovos, co-heads of technical analysis research at MF Global, wrote in a note yesterday. While the benchmark gauge for U.S. equities slid 15 percent from a three-year high on April 29 through last week, not enough individual stocks fell quickly and far enough to signal the overall market reached a low point.

“Indicators that measure the degree that equities are oversold are not signaling such a condition has been met,” New York-based Peskin and Kolovos wrote. “One aspect of this market is clear: there is a lot of overhead resistance for equities to get through. However, we do not see evidence that it can be overcome in the near future.”

Have a wonderful evening everyone.

Be magnificent!

The connection of love is total.

In love, difference disappears

and the human soul accomplishes

its object in perfection,

exceeding its own boundaries

and traversing the threshold of infinity.

-Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1901

As ever,

Carolann

The mind in itself can make a heaven

of Hell and a hell of Heaven.

             -John Milton, 1608-1674