There’s nothing like starting your week with a kick to the guts. The Aussie market was doomed before trading began today with Friday’s shock result by GE in New York. But it’s the collapse of yet another Australian broker, Lift Capital and its 1,600 clients, which threatens to swamp the Aussie market this week.
–But wait, it’s not just Lift. “The list of stock brokers that have been engulfed by the tumbling stock market may be expanded to a fourth victim with concerns growing about Melbourne stock lender Chimaera Capital,” reports today’s Herald Sun. We are finally learning just how many people bought their way into the boom with borrowed money.

–Valuations are out the door for now. If small brokers that offered their clients leverage keep collapsing and liquidating their portfolios, you’d have to be a daredevil or playing with someone else’s money to be a buyer.

–It’s not that there’s no value in the market. It’s that there are so many sellers. The trouble is you just don’t know how much more forced selling there’s going to be. With so much stock being dumped on the market, it pays to be very discrete.

–A quick word about GE before we move on. GE is a world-class jet engine maker. It’s also a shameless money-lender.

–GE’s commercial finance business in Australia has a much higher profile than its business in the States, which goes under a different name altogether But the company’s dirty little secret is getting out: it’s really a financial company masquerading as an industrial.

–The company generated huge earnings during the credit boom as a commercial lender, not an industrial manufacturer. GE reported a double digit decline in first quarter earnings, and promptly blamed the whole thing on Bear Stearns. But if GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt were being candid with investors, he would admit that the problem isn’t with Bear Stearns, but in the performance of GE’s financial segments. Don’t take out word for it. Look below.

GE Summary of Operating Segments (unaudited)

Source: Edgar Online

–You can see that GE’s two big financial segments, Commercial Finance and GE Money, showed a twenty per cent and a nineteen per cent decline in profit in the first quarter, respectively. Earnings in the infrastructure business were actually up.

–GE used to be company that made money by making things. Now it’s a company that loses money by lending money. It’s a pretty good symbol for much of what’s wrong about American capitalism. The truth is, it should probably be two companies, not one.

–While the share market digests the news of collapsing brokers and falling financial profits, the grand poobahs of the world’s economy are wringing their hands in worry. What’s keeping them up at night? The three Fs, each its own kind of crisis: food, fuel, and finance.

–”The World Bank met on Sunday faced with a mounting food price crisis that has sparked deadly unrest in developing countries, underscoring the urgency of fighting hunger and poverty,” reports Channel News Asia.

–How urgent, you ask? The Prime Minister of Haiti was sent packing this weekend by crowds protesting soaring food and fuel prices. We don’t even know who the man is but reckon he won’t be the last public official to be ridden out of town on a rail before this current crisis is over (and it may not be any time soon).

–As usual, it’s the people at the margin (whether lending or with food) that are affected first when surplus turns to scarcity. Despite all the daily signs of abundance here in Australia, let us not forget that there are about four and half billion people on the planet who have little margin for error in their daily lives. If food prices go up, many of these people go hungry.

—World Bank President Robert Zoellick, doing his best impersonation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wants a “new deal” for global food programs. He’s asked richer nations to contribute US$500 million immediately to help get food to poorer nations.

–IMF President Dominique Strauss-Kahn was less pragmatic but more rhetorical. Wrapping up his organisation’s annual spring meeting, he said that, “Food prices, if they go on like they are doing today … the consequences will be terrible…Hundreds of thousands of people will be starving…As we know, learning from the past, those kinds of questions sometimes end in war.”

–People often talk about resource wars being a common feature of the coming century (or decade). But it’s usually oil and energy they’re talking about, not rice and wheat. Food is fuel for the body (we’ve been watching the Biggest Loser). If you don’t have access to cheap calories, what good is cheap fuel?

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