Times Online – A new front is opening up in the battle between London and New York to be the world’s dominant financial centre.

Hedge funds, and the thorny question of where they decide to do business over the coming months, could mark a turning point in the delicate balance of power between the two market capitals.

Despite widespread fears that hundreds of funds are poised to collapse, any shake-out in the industry will still leave hundreds of healthy firms with billions to invest.

Experts say that some of the industry’s biggest funds are considering whether to move billions of dollars worth of assets across the Atlantic to the United States in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank.

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Tags: boom-days, finance, indexes, journalism, lehman-brothers-holdings, losses, market-timing, mayhem, nutmeg, sumitomo, toll-brothers

Edmonton Sun – Stop worrying about a carbon tax driving up the cost of everything we buy after this election.

Start worrying about a cap-and-trade carbon market doing the same thing.

Canada will only get a carbon tax if Liberal Leader Stephane Dion wins a majority government Oct. 14, or a minority in which Green Party Leader Elizabeth May holds the balance of power — both unlikely.

By contrast, it’s very likely the next Parliament will create a cap-and-trade system.

To varying degrees, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, NDP Leader Jack Layton, Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe, Dion and May all support cap-and-trade, as do U.S. presidential contenders Barack Obama and John McCain, neither of whom supports a carbon tax.

The American position will put economic pressure on Canada to adopt a cap-and-trade system consistent with the U.S. Both countries already have voluntary carbon markets whose volume would skyrocket under cap-and-trade.

There’s also more support for cap-and-trade, rather than a carbon tax, among provincial governments.

Politicians prefer cap-and-trade to carbon taxes because they never have to say the word "tax," which is also why Dion doesn’t talk about carbon taxes but a "green shift."

But cap-and-trade does exactly what a carbon tax does — puts a price on emitting carbon — an added cost to businesses they will pass along to us for everything we buy from utilities to fuel, manufactured goods and food.

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Tags: federal-election-commission, presidential-contender, toll-brothers