White House, MSM Unable to Refute $200 Million-a-Day Mumbai Trip

Big Journalism

It’s been widely reported that the President’s impending trip to Mumbai, first by an Indian newspaper:

The US would be spending a whopping $200 million (Rs. 900 crore approx) per day on President Barack Obama’s visit to the city.

“The huge amount of around $200 million would be spent on security, stay and other aspects of the Presidential visit,” a top official of the Maharashtra Government privy to the arrangements for the high-profile visit said.

About 3,000 people including Secret Service agents, US government officials and journalists would accompany the President. Several officials from the White House and US security agencies are already here for the past one week with helicopters, a ship and high-end security instruments.

Citi: Central Banks Are Going To Start Dumping Dollars In The Coming Weeks

QE2 is likely to serve as a reminder to central bank reserve managers that they still have way too many dollars, and that they need to diversify away.

That’s the argument from Citi’s Steven Englander:

With FOMC out of the way and largely meeting expectations, investors are looking for what comes next. We think that reserve managers will contribute to the next stage of USD weakness as QE2 confirms their worst fears about the Fed’s intentions and the quality of their reserves portfolios. To exacerbate their concerns, Global reserves have been growing very rapidly, on a headline basis about 11% over the last year and now are close to USD9trn (Figure 1). While Chinese reserves growth gets a large amount of attention, other countries reserves are growing similarly rapidly.