In last Thursday’s Taipan Insider, I talked about the current dispute between Russia and Ukraine over natural gas supplies.

Since this latest row began, supplies to Eastern Europe have been nearly non-existant. And major Western European countries were starting to feel the pinch, too. Some countries were even forced to dip into reserves, this being the onset of the bitter winter season.

Now, Russia says it will resume supplying natural gas tomorrow morning. This is only after a monitoring deal has been agreed to by both parties and mediated by the European Union.

Still, it may be a while, reports the BBC, before supplies return to normal.

The overnight low temperature in Prague, Czech Republic, tonight is 15 degrees fahrenheit.

Last week I told you how Israel’s market, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange was seemingly immune to rockets. Even a reporter for the Haaretz Daily Newspaper, Hagai Amit, wrote, “The bottom line, the stock market is used to rockets.”

I also told you that Israel’s TASE was more likely to be influenced by the global economic crisis than the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

Turns out, I was right (so far).

In Taipan Insider, an exclusive report for all members of Taipan Publishing Group’s services, I gave an in-depth report about Israel’s performance through these crises. I said:

Last Monday, the TASE-100 rebounded as high as 550.88.
This Monday, the TASE-100 hit a high of 600.95.

In short, Israel’s TASE is following other major world indices and seemingly putting in a bottom. In spite of this ongoing conflict.

Again, Arab markets in the region are mixed, with the UAE market up nearly 6% and Qatar’s market down nearly 4%.

To me, this “proves” that the conflict is not the major factor in the region right now. The global economy is the big player.

And today, we’ve seen the TASE-100 climb even higher, popping up to 618.24, a rise of 4.5%.

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Yesterday, I told Taipan Insider readers that Argentina’s penion nationalization left much to be desired in the way of transparency. On Monday, a federal judge froze assets here in the U.S. in connection with the pension.

Read my full Taipan Insider article (available to all Taipan Publishing Group members) for all the details.

But that’s not the end of the nationalization trend.

Actually, it’s not the beginning either. The timeline can get a bit confusing, so try and stick with me…

On May 25, 2003, Nestor Kirchner was elected president of Argentina. He was elected by default, however… The main candidate, former President Carlos Menem, withdrew from the race for fear of a run-off election that he felt he could not win.

He was a popular president, though, with one of his notable acheivements being the renegotiation of Argentina’s massive debt from defaulted loans with the IMF. He successfully dropped the payback amount to about one-third of the original amount.

But in the background, President Kirchner was creating state-owned companies and nationalizing a number of industries: energy, railways, water companies, and telecoms.

The Economist wrote about him on August 10, 2006, “By founding state-owned enterprises and re-nationalising privatised ones he has expanded the executive’s power over employment and prices… His biggest triumph came on August 3rd, when Congress gave him authority to reallocate government spending as he sees fit.”

That’s in line with some of Kirchner’s closest allies, like Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela. Even the leftist Lula da Silva, president of Brazil has some nationalization tendencies. (Read my blog post from Nov. 12 for more info.)

So with so much of the countries infrastructure under the State’s belt, what’s left for private investors?

Not much, and dwindling everyday, it would seem.

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