Martes 22/02/11 Posible guerra civil en Libia

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Korea -1.5%, Australia -0.27%, el Nikkei -.131%,

Oil up 97.54

Yen up 83.03, euro down 1.3647.

Los futures del Dow Jones estan 104 puntos a la baja!!

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Au up

SPOT MARKET IS OPEN
closes in 21 hrs. 42 mins.
Feb 21, 2011 19:33 NY Time
Bid/Ask 1408.10 - 1409.10
Low/High 1393.40 - 1411.10
Change +1.50 +0.11%
30daychg +65.70 +4.89%
1yearchg +291.00 +26.05%
Charts...

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La plata subio por arriba de $34 a 34.12 a esta hora.

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8:12 p.m. EST 02/21/11Futures
  Last Change Settle
Crude Oil 93.17 6.97 86.20
Gold 1410.4 21.8 1388.6
DJ Industrials 12288 -87 12375
S&P 500 1328.00 -14.40 1342.40
8:23 p.m. EST 02/21/11Currencies
  Last (bid) Prior Day †
Japanese Yen (USD/JPY) 82.92 83.11
Euro (EUR/USD) 1.3615 1.3675
† Late Monday in New York.

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5:05 p.m. EST 02/18/11Treasurys
    Price Chg Yield %
2-Year Note*   1/32 0.755
10-Year Note*   -2/32 3.582
* at close
10:05 p.m. EST 02/21/11Futures
  Last Change Settle
Crude Oil 92.86 6.66 86.20
Gold 1403.9 15.3 1388.6
DJ Industrials 12282 -93 12375
S&P 500 1328.20 -14.20 1342.40
10:15 p.m. EST 02/21/11Currencies
  Last (bid) Prior Day †
Japanese Yen (USD/JPY) 83.38 83.11
Euro (EUR/USD) 1.3571 1.3675
† Late Monday in New York.

[admin]

10:14 p.m. EST 02/21/11Major Stock Indexes
  Last Change % Chg

Global Dow 2219.49 -14.08 -0.63
Japan: Nikkei Average 10644.38 -213.15 -1.96
Stoxx Europe 600* 287.18 -3.86 -1.33
UK: FTSE 100* 6014.80 -68.19 -1.12

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Moody's rebaja la deuda de Japon.



ASIA BUSINESSFEBRUARY 21, 2011, 10:17 P.M. ET
Moody's Lowers Japan's Debt Outlook

By WILLIAM SPOSATO

TOKYO—Moody's Investors Service sent a warning to Japan's political leadership Tuesday, announcing that it was cutting the outlook on the nation's Aa2 bond rating to negative from stable, citing the political gridlock that is dimming chances for action soon to rein in the nation's ballooning debt load.

Japan Real Time

Real DPJ Headache: Moody's or Middle East?
S&P Cuts Japan Credit Rating (1/27/11)
The move, another headache for beleaguered Prime Minister Naoto Kan, comes hot on the heels of Standard & Poor's move on Jan. 27 to lower its debt rating for Japan to AA- from AA.

S&P said at the time that the government "lacks a coherent strategy" to deal with the debt situation. The Moody's action is not a downgrade but a change in outlook is often the first step to a full downgrade of a debt rating.

Its current rating level is one notch higher than the S&P level. Japan's total government debt load is nearly 200% of its total annual economic output, the worst debt load among all major industrialized countries.

While the debt burden has been growing steadily, successive governments have been unable to come up with a solution. Moody's noted that even Bank of Japan Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa has said that "as history shows, no country can continue to run (large) fiscal deficits forever."

Mr. Kan has proposed a tax restructuring that would see an increase in the consumption tax to help pay for the needs of Japan's aging society. However, his weakened political state means that this is increasingly unlikely to pass as his support erodes. The opposition parties, whose support would be necessary to pass budget-related bills, have ruled out any help to the administration and there are growing calls for Mr. Kan to step down.

With the possibility now being raised of a snap election, the long-running political turmoil is likely to last. Mr. Kan is already the fifth prime minister in the past four years. In the latest flare-up, a group of 16 lawmakers within the ruling party have threatened to vote against the government, further complicating the political maneuvering.

"The rating action was prompted by heightened concern that economic and fiscal policies may not prove strong enough to achieve the government's deficit reduction target and contain the inexorable rise in debt, which already is well above levels in other advanced economies," Moody's said in its statement. Given Japan's massive pool of savings and the fact that its debt is almost all held domestically, Moody's said the growing fiscal problems were not likely to cause an immediate crisis in the Japanese government bond market in the near- to medium-term but said that such pressures will grow over the longer term. "Japan's very large economy and very deep financial markets provide the wherewithal to absorb economic shocks. Nevertheless, the inexorable rise in government debt suggests that actions are urgently needed to regain a path of fiscal consolidation," Moody's said in its statement.

Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda declined to comment on the downgrade.

"I won't comment on each action by private credit rating agencies, he told reporters.

The Moody's announcement comes even as some opposition politicians worry that political gridlock is driving the country over a fiscal cliff. Taro Kono, a member of parliament in the opposition Liberal Democratic Party told Dow Jones Newswires that his own party's attempt to block legislation needed to permit further borrowing to finance the deficit "is a dangerous move. We are not sure how markets will react." He added that "the two parties need to sit down and learn how to make an agreement."

Markets showed no sudden reaction to the move, with Japanese government bond prices little changed.

The announcement did exacerbate a slide in the Nikkei Stock Average, which was down 1.9% at 0130 GMT, with banking and other financial sector shares especially hard hit on the prospect of a decline in the value of their JGB holdings.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (8306.TO) finished the morning session on the Tokyo Stock Exchange down 3.4% at Y454, while Nomura Holdings (8604.TO) fell 4.2% to Y526.

The dollar was at Y83.14 at 0225 GMT, little changed from before the Moody's announcement. "Yen-selling should be short-lived as the ratio of overseas JGB holders (to total holders) is low," said Masafumi Yamamoto, chief FX strategist at Barclays Bank in Tokyo.

Credit default swaps, which measure the perceived risk that a country may default on its debt, widened around three basis points to 81-83 basis points for the five-year maturity, traders said. A Moody's Investors Service spokesman said the agency will hold a briefing about the outlook change later today. From 0600GMT, Thomas Byrne, senior vice president of the agency, will hold a meeting in Tokyo, the spokesman said.

[admin]

China pone mas censuras a las redes sociales

Pueden seguirse usando mientras el contenido no sea controversial
ASIA NEWSFEBRUARY 22, 2011
China Co-Opts Social Media to Head Off Unrest
Government allows networking sites—if they block or remove controversial material
By JEREMY PAGE
BEIJING—China's domestic security chief, Zhou Yongkang, added his voice to calls for tighter Internet controls as censors ratcheted up temporary online restrictions, a day after a failed attempt to use social-networking sites to start a "Jasmine Revolution" in China.

Mr. Zhou, one of the nine members of the Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee, the country's top decision-making body, was quoted in official media Monday as saying Chinese officials needed to find new ways to defuse social unrest.

Handful Respond to Call for Protests

View Slideshow

Reuters
A man was arrested by police in front of the Peace Cinema, where internet social networks were calling to join a 'Jasmine Revolution' protest, in downtown Shanghai Sunday.

He made the remarks at a meeting of Chinese officials on Sunday, when police and Internet censors easily thwarted an anonymous online appeal for people to stage simultaneous antigovernment protests in Beijing, Shanghai and 11 other Chinese cities.

"Strive to defuse conflicts and disputes while they are still embryonic," Mr. Zhou was quoted as saying. On Saturday, President and party chief Hu Jintao also called in a speech for tighter Internet supervision to help prevent social unrest.

Only a handful of people turned up Sunday for the planned protests, as police detained or confined to their homes dozens of activists across China and Internet censors blocked searches for the word "Jasmine" on Twitter-like microblogging sites and other websites.

Communist Party leaders have issued a flurry of statements in the past few days reflecting their concern that social issues such as rising food prices, combined with the unbridled flow of information over the Internet, could trigger the kind of protests that have challenged authoritarian governments in the Mideast and North Africa.

At the same time, the government has demonstrated many of the tools at its disposal to prevent such a protest movement from gaining traction—from thuggery and physical intimidation to media manipulation and a sophisticated Internet censorship system, known as the "Great Firewall."

Despite the role of Twitter and Facebook Inc. in mobilizing protests in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, China is, for the moment, allowing Chinese social-networking sites to flourish—provided they cooperate with censors by removing or blocking controversial material.

One social-networking site, Renren.com—a Chinese equivalent of Facebook that focuses on entertainment and is rarely used for political discussion—said Monday that it planned a $500 million initial public offering in New York. (Please see related article on page C3.)

View Full Image

Reuters
Police chased away and arrested would-be demonstrators in downtown Shanghai on Sunday.

A senior foreign-policy planning official said the Chinese government wasn't worried by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech last week in which she said China and other authoritarian countries were facing a "dictator's dilemma" on how to control the Internet.

"We're not afraid," the official told a small group of foreign and Chinese reporters Monday. "We don't have anything to worry about, but we have to prevent people from using the Internet to damage or destroy social stability."

He said China had identified the potential benefits and risks of the Internet early on, and he compared it to a nuclear weapon that could make a country strong, while also exposing it to new dangers.

The official blamed the recent unrest in the Mideast and North Africa principally ontheir relatively slow economic development and their "old methods" of controlling society.

China, by contrast, has maintained rapid economic growth while using a combination of old and new methods to prevent a repeat of the 1989 pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square that were crushed by the army.

At one end of the spectrum, China has used traditional judicial and extrajudicial measures, jailing some dissidents, such as Liu Xiaobo, who won last year's Nobel Peace Prize, while placing others, including his wife, under a form of house arrest that is technically illegal. Before Sunday's call for a "Jasmine Revolution," Chinese police detained or confined to their homes dozens of other political activists, according to several human-rights groups.

Earlier this month, rights groups reported that security officers had beaten a blind lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, and his wife after the couple smuggled out a video showing they were being confined to their home, even after Mr. Chen was released from prison.

At the other end of the spectrum, China's Internet censors have demonstrated a highly sophisticated capacity to control the flow of information online without shutting it down completely—mainly by obliging Internet companies to remove politically sensitive content.

When the protests in Egypt began, for example, censors allowed limited reporting and discussion of the unrest online but kept a lid on the number of people viewing it, mainly by blocking searches for "Egypt" and related terms, first on microblogging sites, and then, starting Sunday, on other sites as well.

View Full Image

Associated Press
A policeman, at center, urges people to leave the site of a planned demonstration in Beijing on Sunday.

They quickly took the controls to a new level on Sunday, after the anonymous appeal for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China appeared on a U.S.-based Chinese-language website and began to be circulated first on Twitter, which is blocked in China, and then on some Chinese microblogging sites.

All references to the appeal were deleted from Chinese sites, and searches for "Jasmine" and related words were blocked on search engines and microblogging sites, and people were temporarily prevented from posting items with photographs and links to other sites. The search function on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging sites, was disabled.

On Monday, many Internet users reported having problems using the virtual private networks that normally let them circumvent the Great Firewall to view politically sensitive sites.

Many people also reported having problems sending text messages including references to Sunday's planned protests, such as the word "Wangfujing"—the name of the shopping district where protesters were encouraged to gather in Beijing on Sunday.

Chinese officials appear to be particularly concerned about microblogs, which can spread information so quickly that tens of thousands of users may notice if something is suddenly blocked or a function isn't available, especially if it was posted by someone popular.

Qiao Mu, director of the Center for International Communications Studies at Beijing Foreign Students University, said Sina Weibo appeared to be deleting more posts since President Hu's speech Saturday calling for tighter Internet controls. "I think the Internet situation in China will get worse," he said.

[admin]

Asia-Pacific
INDEX VALUE CHANGE % CHANGE TIME
NIKKEI 225 10,644.40 -213.15 -1.96% 21:28
HANG SENG INDEX 23,023.80 -461.59 -1.97% 22:24
S&P/ASX 200 INDEX 4,858.20 -41.80 -0.85% 22:40

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SHANGHAI SE COMPOSITE 2,876.01 -56.24 -1.92% 22:25

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KOSPI INDEX 1,964.94 -40.36 -2.01% 22:13
KOSPI 200 INDEX 259.53 -5.02 -1.90% 22:13

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Live Spot Prices

SPOT PRICE IS OPEN
Price: US$/lb 

Copper February 22,07:58
Bid/Ask 4.3753 - 4.3765
Change -0.0778 -1.75%
Low/High 4.3635 - 4.4799
Charts

Nickel February 22,07:58
Bid/Ask 13.0694 - 13.0802
Change -0.1864 -1.41%
Low/High 12.9328 - 13.2957
Charts

Aluminum February 22,07:59
Bid/Ask 1.1142 - 1.1164
Change -0.0316 -2.76%
Low/High 1.1127 - 1.1497
Charts

Zinc February 22,07:58
Bid/Ask 1.1295 - 1.1304
Change -0.0290 -2.51%
Low/High 1.1124 - 1.1620
Charts

Lead February 22,07:59
Bid/Ask 1.1565 - 1.1572
Change -0.0460 -3.83%
Low/High 1.1490 - 1.2060

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Los futures del Dow Jones 84 puntos a la baja.

Libor igual 0.31%

Europa mixta, el Asia cerro a la baja.

Oil (Abril 96.18)

Yields down 3.53%

Au up 1,399, Ag up, futures cu down

Euro down 1.3664

[admin]

SPANISHFEBRUARY 22, 2011, 12:03 A.M. ET
La crisis en Libia afecta la producción de crudo
Petroleras extranjeras cierran operaciones y evacúan a empleados
Por Guy Chazan

La violencia en África del Norte comenzó el lunes a impactar la producción de crudo, a medida que las petroleras internacionales con presencia en Libia cerraban sus operaciones y trasladaban a sus empleados a lugares seguros en medio de crecientes choques entre partidarios y opositores del coronel Muamar Gadafi.

Las preocupaciones respecto al impacto de los disturbios en el suministro global hicieron subir el precio del crudo el lunes y el Brent, el tipo de referencia en Europa, llegó en un momento a US$105 el barril, su mayor nivel en dos años y medio.

Mientras tanto, el costo de asegurar la deuda soberana de los países del norte de África y de Medio Oriente subió luego de que dos de las tres principales agencias de calificación de crédito bajaran la nota de los títulos de Baréin y Libia. Fitch Ratings bajó la calificación de Libia a BBB por "la erupción del riego político", mientras que Standard & Poor's Ratings Services redujo la de deuda soberana de Bahrein a A-, debido a que prevé que las manifestaciones en el país persistan pese a las medidas de fuerza del gobierno.

Los persistentes desórdenes amenazan con deshacer años de esfuerzos de compañías como BP PLC y gobiernos como el británico que, hambrientos por acceder al petróleo libio, cortejaron a Gadafi a pesar de las fuertes críticas políticas.

Hasta esta semana, los disturbios que sacuden a África del Norte y Medio Oriente habían tenido poco impacto material en el balance energético global. Los buques petroleros continuaron navegando por el Canal de Suez a pesar de las masivas protestas que derribaron al presidente egipcio Hosni Mubarak.

Pero eso cambió el lunes cuando Wintershall, la división de exploración de petróleo y gas de la alemana BASF AG y una de las mayores compañías que operan en Libia, anunció que suspendería la producción de 100.000 barriles diarios. La empresa también informó que estaba evacuando a 130 empleados extranjeros, un tercio de su plantilla en ese país.

Wintershall, que ha estado activa en Libia desde 1958, actualmente opera ocho yacimientos petrolíferos en el desierto libio, a unos 350 kilómetros al sudoeste de Benghazi, una ciudad costera que habría caído bajo control de los opositores del régimen de Gadafi.

El este de Libia, donde se ha concentrado la mayor parte de los disturbios, representa alrededor de la mitad de la producción de 1,8 millones de barriles diarios del país, de acuerdo con la Agencia Internacional de Energía (AIE). El líder de una tribu del este del país, Al Zawiya, ha amenazado con cortar las exportaciones de petróleo si la violencia contra los manifestantes continúa.

David Fyfe, un analista de mercados petroleros de la AIE, dijo que la pérdida de tanta producción era "por supuesto una fuente de preocupación", pero "no una causa de pánico". No tendrá ningún impacto importante en el suministro, agregó.

También el lunes, la petrolera británica BP señaló que había suspendido sus operaciones para una planeada campaña de perforación en el desierto libio y que también se preparaba para evacuar a sus empleados y sus familias. La empresa todavía no produce petróleo o gas en Libia, pero tiene un ambicioso programa de exploración.

La italiana ENI SpA, la mayor productora en Libia con alrededor de 244.000 barriles diarios, indicó que estaba evacuando a todo su personal no esencial y a sus familias, aunque aclaró que eso afectaría su producción. Statoil ASA, la compañía petrolera noruega, informó que cerró su oficina en la capital, Trípoli.

Durante la década de los años 70, Libia fue uno de los mayores productores de crudo de la Organización de Países Exportadores de Petróleo (OPEP), al extraer más de tres millones de barriles al día. Por un breve período, produjo incluso más que Arabia Saudita, pieza clave de la OPEP.

Sin embargo, tras el golpe de Estado que instaló a Gadafi como el líder del país, y la subsiguiente nacionalización de la industria petrolera, la producción cayó fuertemente, golpeada por las sanciones internacionales, las cuotas impuestas por la OPEP y la mala administración.

Libia ahora produce alrededor de 2% del suministro mundial. Gran parte de ese petróleo es exportado y cualquier interrupción podría perjudicar a las refinadoras del sur de Francia, Italia y España.

A pesar de las sacudidas en distintos países, los analistas dicen que los mercados de crudo están hoy bien abastecidos. Aunque los niveles de inventarios se han reducido en los pasados seis meses, todavía hay suministros adecuados para cubrir la demanda futura. Además, la OPEP puede comenzar a utilizar su capacidad ociosa de seis millones de barriles diarios si el suministro disminuye.