Amazon: Just Keeps Rolling

Mixing rivers is almost as bad as mixing metaphors but Paul Robeson's words about the Mississippi sung in "Ole Man River" from the 1936 musical "Show Boat" are in this instance appropriate. Amazon .com 's namesake the river is also just "...rollin' along..".This morning it electronically cyber inked a deal with the legendary but disappearing Sears. Sears once offered mail order brides in the 19th century along with coffins with lids among many other gadgets etc.Today Amazon founder and CEO Busy Bee J. Bezos agreed to sell Sear's brand Kenmore on the Amazon website.This offering expands the list of goods and services available to shoppers every where.Recently Amazon purchased Whole Foods . This moved the Big A into organics. Heretofore Amazon mostly offered plastic composition products.I wondered about Bezos' choice of Amazon as a company name. I wonder no more. Amazon some what like the South American River is delivering plastic and now organics in mind numbing cubical steady volumes in card board packages. But unlike the River that brings life to its thousand mile shores the Company brings mostly plastic. I think of the square miles of plastic floating islands in the oceans.Could we be in the silly part of the always unfolding tech world?

Inflation Is Poised To Rise Because Of China Pollution

 AKS Steel Holding Company recently announced an across the board price increase on all its steel products of 2%. It cited rising demand across the globe. United States Steel has similar robust prospects. Alcoa and other basic material dealers are demonstrating a turn around in their stock price and the price of the their underlying metal ingots. China's pollution woes will provide a white hot boost to basic metals pricing. Simply the Chinese people can be content with 150 feet visability in cities because of coal-fired manufacturing and utility production or the smoke stacks will be shut down in the interest of public health. With this cutting back of steel , aluminum , copper and other materials and finished goods will come some or a lot of inflation. That will kill equities and may bring down China's highly leveraged real estate , banking and municipalities. But that may be a year away. So in the interim buy steel, copper, aluminum stocks. Later buy massive amounts of out-of the-money puts on the major indicies as stagflation grips the economies around the world.