About a month ago, I told you all here that Rio Tinto (RTP:NYSE) was in dire straits… But that was only half the story. The rest I told to the exclusive membership of Taipan Insider. Now, as the mining industry continues to make the news, particularly with China Investment Corp,’s (CIC) announcement that it will focus on natural resource investments - rather than make more investments in the failing sectors of finance and real estate - I want to share the rest with you, because it will lead us up to the current situation.

So here’s your exclusive peek at Taipan Insider…

BHP Billiton (BHP:NYSE) is a leading miner in nearly every metal and mineral in the world, with global operations stretching from Mozambique to Peru… Just look at these statistics:

• 3rd largest copper producer
• 6th largest aluminum producer
• 3rd largest nickel producer
• 4th largest gold producer
• 2nd largest uranium producer
• 2nd largest zinc producer
• 4th largest coal producer

That’s a pretty stacked resume…

Continue Reading »

Last Tuesday, I told Taipan Publishing Group subscribers in Taipan Insider that one Middle Eastern country was injecting massive amounts of cash into international markets.

That’s not really news nowadays, though, is it? Everyone’s heard of the $7.5 billion Citigroup bailout by Abu Dhabi back in November 2007.

But things have noticably been slowing down. When billions of dollars worth of investments get halved in value in less than a year, it makes you think.

Yet for some regions, this credit crunch is an opportunity of a lifetime.

Think about it. You’re an oil-rich nation with foreign currency reserves well into the hundreds of billions. Major global institutions are searching desparately for cash. Their fellow financial institutions are equally cash-strapped.

Suddenly, your country has a lot of power.

Continue Reading »

With cash-strapped companies coming cup-in-hand to their equally cash-strapped governments, the world over is looking for Warren Buffett-sized checkbooks to help ease the credit crunch.

Increasingly, the world is looking to China and its $1.9 trillion in reserves.

Should China whip open its gigantic checkbook to bailout the global financial system?

Does it even want to?

China’s been burned before with its investments in the U.S. financial sector. It has a 9.9% stake ($5 billion) in Morgan Stanley (MS:NYSE) that has been pummeled by the industry-wide downturn. And some Chinese leaders believe that the U.S. and Western Europe should clean up their own mess.

Continue Reading »

Major markets around the world are being sucked into the black hole that is the U.S. economic crisis.

There are those that say we need to share the blame, and yes, there are banks in the UK and in Germany, and other Western economies, that have wandered down the same path and ended up in the same bramble bush… But the U.S. financial system has really become the black hole of the global economic universe.

Just look at all the cash that was thrown into the system: $12.5 billion injected into Citigroup by the government of Singapore and the Kuwait Investment Authority; China Investment Corp. paided $5 billion for a 9.9% stake in Morgan Stanley; Merrill Lynch got $6.6 billion from Korea…

And that doesn’t include the investments in other institutions across the pond, like the investments in Barclays by Singapore’s Temasek and the Qatar Investment Authority, or the Credit Suisse, Standard Charter, and UBS investments from SWFs around the world.

As you can imagine, these folks aren’t happy that their investments have all but disappeared. They’re not likely to make any similar investments in the near future, either.

And that leaves a gigantic wound in the financial machine… A black hole that continues to suck investor’s cash down a never-ending drain.

Thought the Dow would hold at 10,000? It didn’t.

Think the $700 billion “Death Star” bailout will contain the problem to just the U.S.? It won’t.

Continue Reading »