What is the pollution level in the world’s 4th most polluted country?

3. What is the pollution level in the world’s 4th most polluted country?

ANSWER: 145 ug/m3

All American Investor

Is the Barrons Cover the Kiss of Death for Jeff Bezos and Amazon (AMZN)?

Wow. Last night, just after midnight I wrote about Amazon (AMZN)--Amazon . Toast up 5000 percent since IPO (Chart).

Next thing I know, an article from Barron's pops into my reader--The World's Best Retailer. Ironic? Well, yeah.

Here is a note of caution. Jeff Bezos is on the cover of Barron's this week. Why is this important?

If you read my article, Amazon . Toast, all the way to the end you would have noticed that Jeff Bezos was named Time's person of the year in 1999. What happened next? The stock dropped from a split adjusted $113 a share, all the way down to $5.67. Yikes.

Is the Barron's cover the kiss of death for Jeff Bezos and Amazon?

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Jeff Bezos' Amazon.com is winning customers with competitive prices, wide selection, reliability -- and Kindle. It's winning shareholders, too.

The World's Best Retailer --Barron's

THIS MAY BE AN OPPORTUNE time to add shares of Amazon.com to your shopping cart and proceed to checkout.

Now, Amazon is taking that a step further by providing Web services, better known these days as "cloud computing." What is cloud computing? It is the outsourcing of information-technology and data-center operations to third parties, mostly by small- and medium-sized companies that choose not to spend their resources to deal with these tasks themselves. (The name cloud derives from the remote ether-like computer space where the outsourced operations take place.) Amazon, which has spent more than $2 billion on its systems in the last decade, has divided these services into several parts, including: Amazon Simple DB (databases), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (computing capacity) and Amazon Simple Storage (data storage).

Price believes these services could eventually generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually -- and investors are getting them for almost nothing.

The second kicker is Kindle, a digital-reading device. Its original version was generally well received, but its recently released 2.0 edition has become a hit with consumers. Wall Street analysts estimate the company has sold 350,000 of the devices, which got a plug from Oprah Winfrey last fall.

Bob DeMarco is a citizen journalist and twenty year Wall Street veteran. Bob has written more than 500 articles with more than 11,000 links to his work on the Internet. Content from All American Investor has been syndicated on Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Pluck, Blog Critics, and a growing list of newspaper websites. Bob is actively seeking syndication and writing assignments.

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Trend World Protectionism on the Rise

I think most people believe that trade barriers are a bad thing. World protectionism and trade barriers prolonged the recession and impacted trade negatively in the 1930s.

I have to ask myself--have we really learned anything from the past? Or, are we doomed to repeat the same old mistakes?

Seventeen of the G-20 countries recently implemented 47 measures whose effect is to restrict trade at the expense of other countries. I can just hear the analyst on TV--this is no big deal and it won't have a big impact on trade.

These analyst, are the same analyst that, told us over and over that the housing bubble wouldn't have a big effect on the economy or stocks. Right Larry Kudlow? The same analyst that failed to see the interconnectedness of banks and financial companies--as Bear Stears, Lehman, and AIG went down the tube and brought other companies that did business with them to the brink of disaster.

For some reason, analyst have a problem seeing how things are interconnected. They are either dumb, myopic, or in a state of denial like most the country.

You hear the words global economy over and over. There can be no doubt that the world economy is now interconnected. It should be obvious that if one spoke in this interconnectedness breaks the entire wheel stops working. Think of it like the wheel on a bike--when the spoke breaks the wheels gets all wobbly. If you keep riding on the wheel, it will eventually weaken and then collapse. The lesson from this story is, if you fix the broken spoke immediately--the wheel works just fine. But if you keep riding on the bad wheel--it collapses.

There is, at the minimum, anecdotal evidence that global protectionism is on the rise. What are world leaders and politicians likely to do to satisfy angry constituents when their job is on the line? At first, they will stick a lollipop in the mouth of their constituents. But, if that doesn't work, they will give them what they want to perpetuate themselves in office. This is worrisome.

Over here in the U.S. we are now protecting steel, soon it will be the importation of foreign automobiles, then what? For every action there is likely to be an equal and opposite reaction. These are trends that investors need to be watching. Excessive protectionism could cause the next collapse in stock prices. As an investor you need to keep your eyes and ears open--you really need to pay attention to trends and how they can effect stock prices. Like it says up at the top:

How to make money in the market...think beyond the obvious...spot the trends...and do your homework.

If you would like to read about protectionism go here.

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Roubini on Global Recession, Credit Crunch, and Deflation (Part Two)

Part two of Nouriel Rubini's speech at the 2009 CBOE Risk Management Conference. He discusses several topics including: the credit crunch,  global recession, and deflation.

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