Long War: The FLA (good guys) was knocked back out of the oil city of Brega by Gaddafi's army because the bad guys are hiding their tanks and heavy weapons under trees and inside shattered buildings, which makes NATO air strikes more difficult. NATO needs more Special Forces soldiers acting as spotters. Presumably NATO and America will put more boots on the ground, although we are once again up against the possibility of Obama losing his nerve because of erosion within his liberal supporters back home. Left wing blogs are now saying things like: Obama lied, people died. This is scary for the President.
American diplomats are in Benghazi and are paving the rode for formal recognition of the rebel government by the US. This speaks to Obama not losing his nerve but of course anything is possible. The rebels are now shipping oil to Europe and are raking in millions of dollars.
The rest of the Long War rages on. The fighting season in Afghanistan is just now starting and a new problem has arisen. President Kharzai has been making speeches denouncing the whack-job American preacher in Florida who likes to burn Korans. This is tantamount to Kharzai openly siding with the Taliban. In the Cold War it was always a bad idea to get rid of an American puppet leader but there was never a puppet as bad as Kharzai. He is an evil puppet and needs to be taken out or neutralized somehow.
Specific Stocks: China raised interest rates again. This means China is serious about slowing growth and inflation. China has overcapacity in aluminum production and it makes no sense to produce aluminum there in the first place because it is energy intensive and highly polluting. In a free market China would import aluminum and movement is occurring along these lines. This helps Alcoa (AA). Also, Alcoa is technologically more advanced than other aluminum producers, able to create new alloys and products.
Microsoft and Nokia (NOK) are teaming up to put Microsoft's mobile phone software in Nokia smart phones. The market is beginning to understand that it doesn't make any difference if a certain smart phone operating system has 10,000 basic apps or 300,000 basic apps. For instance, Apple has ten times more fart apps than anybody else. What if it had a hundred times more fart apps? Who cares? Going forward, the apps that count are really good online games, not the raw quantity of new fart apps. Microsoft is a powerhouse in video games and it will spend billions converting Xbox games to Nokia games. In other words, it will subsidize the heck out of Nokia. This will help Nokia a bunch and Microsoft only a tiny bit, if at all.
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