Malaysian tourists trapped in Hat Yai flood

BANGKOK: Hundreds of tourists including Malaysians are still trapped in the Hat Yai district of Songkhla province as the district is still inundated between two and three metres while the death toll in the country due to floods rose to 104 today.

Floods hit the southern part of the country since yesterday and apart from Hat Yai, two other districts in the South – Pathalung and Nakhon Si Thammarat have been declared flood disaster zones while Pattani and Narathiwat provinces have also been hit by floods.

The affected tourists are stuck at hotels and railway stations in Hat Yai. However, their exact number has yet to be ascertained.

The Bank of Thailand today announced that 121 of its branches in the South have been closed temporarily due to the floods.

A total of 162 schools comprising 127 schools in Songkhla, 22 in Narathiwat and 13 schools in Patani have also been closed temporarily.

Thailand's Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Department said the 104 dead were from the northern, northeastern, eastern and central provinces of Thailand.

Apart from the newly-hit southern Thailand, floods still remained in 21 provinces in the northern, northeastern, eastern and central parts of Thailand and close to one million people have been displaced.

However, the flood situation in 17 provinces including Chiang Mai, Sa Kaeo, Samut Prakan and Nakhon Pathom has eased.

Chairman of the Tourism Council of Thailand, Konkrit Hiranyakit, said about 500,000 tourists visit Hat Yai annually and half of them come from Malaysia.

He said the flood was expected to drive away at least 120,000 tourists in Hat Yai this year with tourism losses estimated at 1.2 billion Baht.

"It is going to take at least three weeks to restore the situation in Hat Yai. Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva visited flood areas in Songkhla today," he added.

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Lagu Orang Pattani

The Fed is dead, maybe by 2012

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — OK, so Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the “Black Swan” author, actually said: “The Fed won’t exist in 25 years.” Warning: It’ll happen much sooner, fallout of the coming Second American Revolution.

It’s inevitable: Wall Street banks control the Federal Reserve system , it’s their personal piggy bank. They’ve already done so much damage, yet have more control than ever.

Tea-party activists in their own wordsTea-party activists talk to Russ Britt on what their movement represents.
Warning: That’s a set-up. They will eventually destroy capitalism, democracy, and the dollar’s global reserve-currency status. They will self-destruct before 2035 … maybe as early as 2012 … most likely by 2020.

Last week we cheered the Tea Party for starting the countdown to the Second American Revolution. Our timeline is crucial to understanding the historic implications of Taleb’s prediction that the Fed is dying, that it’s only a matter of time before a revolution triggers class warfare forcing America to dump capitalism, eliminate our corrupt system of lobbying, come up with a new workable form of government, and create a new economy without a banking system ruled by Wall Street.

Read 'America on the brink of a Second Revolution.'

Let’s reexamine the timeline closely:

Stage 1: The Democrats just put the nail in their coffin confirming they’re wimps when they refused to force the GOP to filibuster Bush tax cuts for billionaires.

Stage 2: In the elections the GOP takes over the House, expanding its strategic war to destroy Obama with its policy of “complete gridlock” and “shutting down government.”

Stage 3: Post-election Obama goes lame-duck, buried in subpoenas and vetoes.

Stage 4: In 2012, the GOP wins back the White House and Senate. Health care returns to insurers. Free-market financial deregulation returns. Lobbyists intensify their anarchy.

Stage 5: Before the end of the second term of the new GOP president, Washington is totally corrupted by unlimited, anonymous donations from billionaires and lobbyists. Wall Street’s Happy Conspiracy triggers the third catastrophic meltdown of the 21st century that Robert Shiller of “Irrational Exuberance” fame predicts, resulting in defaults of dollar-denominated debt and the dollar’s demise as the world’s reserve currency.

Stage 6: The Second American Revolution explodes into a brutal full-scale class war with the middle class leading a widespread rebellion against the out-of-touch, out-of-control Happy Conspiracy sabotaging America from within.

Stage 7: The domestic class warfare is exaggerated as the Pentagon’s global warnings play out: That by 2020 “an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge” worldwide and “warfare is defining human life.”

In this rapidly unfolding scenario, the Fed cannot survive. Why? Not because the Fed is at the center of America’s economic problems, beyond repair, a dying institution. But because the Fed is a pawn of Wall Street’s Happy Conspiracy, which is incapable of seeing the train wreck that it set up.

This out-of-control, conspiracy of greedy Wall Street bankers, corporate CEOs, corrupt politicians and Forbes 400 billionaires will, in the near future, trigger the third catastrophic meltdown of the 21st century, a collapse that paradoxically can transform America into a new, stronger post-capitalist economy … but only after a revolution and brutal class warfare. But few will talk about what’s coming.

Warning: Never trust the American Treasury Secretary
So who can you trust to tell us the truth? Taleb says it’s very simple. His “simple metric” was made clear at a recent “Washington Ideas Forum” in a piece by Atlantic editor Nicole Allan: Unfortunately most fail Taleb’s test. Most get it wrong. Many lie, exaggerate, speak half-truths or, worse, say nothing.

Here’s Taleb’s “simple metric for judging whose economic opinions are worth his time: ‘Did someone predict the crisis before it happened” in the past? “If the answer is no, I don’t want to hear what the person says. If the person saw the crisis coming then I want to hear what they have to say” about future crises.

Taleb target No. 1: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who spoke just before Taleb at the forum. Of course, experience tells us you really can’t trust anyone in government. All politicians fudge the numbers, cherry-pick data to suit their personal goals, biases and political rhetoric.

Remember Hank Paulson, Wall Street’s Trojan Horse inside Washington? Earlier he had made over half a billion as Goldman’s CEO. Back in July 2007 before the meltdown he bragged to Fortune that this is “the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime.” Never trust anything “leaders” like him say. Never.

Fed Needs to Pump Trillions More Into Economy

The Federal Reserve needs to pump at least $6 trillion to $7 trillion more into the U.S. economy to have any meaningful impact on sluggish growth, former Bush economic adviser Marc Sumerlin told CNBC.

Sumerlin, co-founder of The Lindsey Group, a Washington DC-based economic advisory group, also said that the U.S. would fall back into a recession if the Bush tax cuts aren't extended beyond this year.

The Fed has hinted for weeks that it is ready to buy up more debt in the credit markets to help spur the economy, which is still recovering from the financial crisis of 2008. The U.S. central bank has already spent over $1 trillion since early 2009 to keep credit markets liquid in what has become known as quantitative easing, or QE. (For a fuller explanation, click here.)

Although the Fed hasn't indicated how much more money it might pump into the economy—which has been labeled QE-2—Sumerlin's recommendation goes well beyond what most other economists expect or even recommend.

"U.S. households have $70 trillion in assets," Sumerlin explained during a live interview. "And the Fed essentially needs to buy enough Treasurys and mortgages that you can get a bid on all those other assets. And when you have leakage in the international system it takes a pretty big amount to be successful. To me, it starts to get interesting at six to seven trillion dollars."

Sumerlin's comments, which came around midday, helped push stocks lower.

“To get someone who was part of the former economic council saying the Fed will need to step up big and do $6 trillion in (asset purchases), was a bit of a shock and created a bit of nervousness,” Marc Pado, market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald, told CNBC.com.

Few economists expect the Fed to commit that much new money to helping the economy, and many think any further quantitative easing wouldn't have that much impact anyway.

Pimco co-CEO Mohamed El-Erian, for instance, told CNBC earlier Thursday that further monetary easing by the Fed and other central banks probably won't work.

"The risk is that this may be ineffective again," he said. "In fact, the big story of the last year and a half is every time we have had a policy action, outcomes have fallen short of expectations."

Raoul Pal, global macro analyst for the Global Macro Investor, who appeared with Sumerlin on CNBC, also questioned the wisdom of further easing.

"There is no evidence that it's ever worked in the past, so there is no real evidence that it will work now," Pal said. "So I think it's a high risk thing for them to try and do. I also don't believe you can get the money in the system. Even if it's $6 trillion, I don't think it's going to get in the system because there is no velocity of money. So all you end up doing is buying the Treasurys off the banks who will keep the money at the Fed."

As for extending the Bush tax cuts—which Congress has put off voting on until after the November elections—Sumerlin said "we will have a recession" if they are allowed to expire.

"Because we're growing too slowly," he said. "If you look at the quarters when the tax cuts went in, there was very substantial growth. People forget that the third quarter of 2003, we grew at 7 percent when the tax cuts—the full marginal rates—took effect. Running that in reverse causes the opposite to happen."

Dollar crunched again

The U.S. dollar dropped to its lowest level since January, even as a prominent Federal Reserve official cast doubt on the assumption that the Fed will move toward another round of asset purchases at next month's regularly scheduled meeting.

Trade trauma ahead?
The U.S. currency fell to 81.8 yen, its lowest since April 1995, and was trading at $1.39 against the euro. The dollar index tumbled to 77.2, matching a low last seen in January.

The latest declines came after Friday's weak jobs report seemingly boosted the case for a return to so-called quantitative easing, in which the Fed buys Treasury bonds to push down interest rates. Private nonfarm payrolls rose by 64,000 last month, showing a tepid recovery continues but falling short of expected 75,000-job gain.

The figures "are well clear of a 'double-dip' signal for the economy but they are consistent with continued disinflation which supports the case for an expansion of Fed QE at the November FOMC meeting," Tullett Prebon economist Lena Komileva wrote in a note to clients.

But James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said in an interview on CNBC Friday that the push toward more easing isn't a "slam dunk" and stressed that members of the Federal Open Market Committee will decide only after reviewing more data on the economy.

Bullard also noted the potential drawbacks to another round of QE, reflecting comments made in recent weeks by other regional Fed presidents.

"This is unchartered waters... (inflation) may get away from us if we are not careful," Bullard said.

Among the chief risks of still looser Fed policy has become apparent in recent weeks with the outbreak of hostilities in currency markets. A weaker dollar pushes up the value of rival currencies, making it harder for growth-strapped countries to export their way out of their problems.

The great fear should the Fed commit to another round of QE, Komileva said, is that it will end up "exporting deflation to the rest of the world through weak domestic demand and global currency majors' strength against the dollar