11 March 2011

A Message Received From a Friend In Japan


As a side note I have taken profits and/or hedged out some of the risks on the somewhat oversized mining trades I had placed this morning in the precious metals complex when the Bankmistress and her crew threw their daily hissy fit over being trapped in a rather large silver short, with the plebes daring to demand delivery.

The news from Japan is not good, and Saudi Arabia is eerily quiet. But at the end of the day, all these US based markets are a hologram remotely related to economic reality anymore, just the dream of a Bernankesque butterfly.

"Just got home 3 AM.

The problem is that most trains are not running. People walking home, streets were packed, traffic really slow. Then they get to Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Shibuya, and can't go farther, so are packing karaoke boxes and restaurants and sleeping in the station until morning. Ikebukuro station had people lining the walls napping.

So, for the most part, for most people in Tokyo, it was a big nuisance. Had that quake happened off the coast of Chiba or Tokyo Bay, it would have been unbelievably bad.

I have never seen this before. The megaquake seems to be setting off secondary quakes all over, from central Honshu to east Honshu... up to 500 miles from the megaquake.

These are not aftershocks. The secondary quakes are magnitude 4, 5, 6 and are happening so frequently, say every 5 to 10 minutes, that the newscasters can't speak fast enough. No sooner does the alert go off and they describe a quake, then the next one happens somewhere else. I can feel all these quakes even though they occur hundreds of miles from Tokyo.

Basically, there has been a quake you could feel every 10 minutes or so for the last 14 hours."

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