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Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter; a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place. |
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3/17/2005
The Meaning of Trade Numbers, by George Zachar
The greens are blocking a runway extension in Hamburg that would allow companies to take delivery of Airbus equipment in Germany.
If the greens succeed, the aircraft will instead have to be picked up in Toulouse, France.
In an item not on their free web site, the FT (back page of first hard copy section) says "the loss to Germany's trade account could be several hundred million euros" next year alone.
Of course, the location of the formal handing over of the keys, as it were, is meaningless economically.
The engineering and manufacturing value added takes place at various, known, sites around Europe.
But apparently it is the formality of the handover that matters to the beancounters and by extension the trade balance boffins of the world.
Keep this in mind the next time you're tempted to read another scare story about trade.
George Zachar is principal of Greensward Capital, a money management and trading firm in New York. He focuses on U.S. and European debt futures and options thereon. "I try to integrate market directional and volatility trades, with "living to fight another day" my central guiding philosophy," Zachar says. "When I was a child, I remember watching a cheesy spy movie, where one spook says to his opposite number, "The object of the game is to stay in the game."