Monday 1-10-11

After the vacation, well really not a vaction just a break.

Deepening crisis traps America's have-nots
The US is drifting from a financial crisis to a deeper and more insidious social crisis. Self-congratulation by the US authorities that they have this time avoided a repeat of the 1930s is premature.

There is a telling detail in the US retail chain store data for December. Stephen Lewis from Monument Securities points out that luxury outlets saw an 8.1pc rise from a year ago, but discount stores catering to America’s poorer half rose just 1.2pc.

Tiffany’s, Nordstrom, and Saks Fifth Avenue are booming. Sales of Cadillac cars have jumped 35pc, while Porsche’s US sales are up 29pc.

Cartier and Louis Vuitton have helped boost the luxury goods stock index by almost 50pc since October. Yet Best Buy, Target, and Walmart have languished.

Such is the blighted fruit of Federal Reserve policy. The Fed no longer even denies that the purpose of its latest blast of bond purchases, or QE2, is to drive up Wall Street, perhaps because it has so signally failed to achieve its other purpose of driving down borrowing costs.

Yet surely Ben Bernanke’s `trickle down’ strategy risks corroding America’s ethic of solidarity long before it does much to help America’s poor.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8249181/Deepening-crisis-traps-Americas-have-nots.html

Devastating fungus ravages common banana crops
January 10, 2011 - 8:10am

WASHINGTON -- A fungus scientists have dubbed "the HIV of banana plantations" has ravaged huge crops of the cavendish variety -- the only kind of banana available in American grocery stores.

The spread of the soil-borne fungus Tropical Race IV has ruined crops across China, the Philippines and Australia, and is expected to spread next to Central America, where American distributors get the fruit.

Two teams of scientists are trying to genetically engineer cavendish bananas that are resistant to the fungus.

There are thousands of kinds of bananas worldwide, but the Cavendish, discovered in a Chinese household garden by a nineteenth-century British Explorer, represents 99 percent of the international market, according to a New Yorker report.

Most other exported varieties won't withstand the international trip or ripen too quickly.

The New Yorker reports in 2008 Americans ate 7.6 billion pounds of Cavendish bananas, which at 60 cents a pound are also very cheap.

http://wtop.com/?nid=25&sid=2228704