Is a crash going to soon hit the Philippine stock market---now already "the most expensive in Asia", red hot and the bull run already in its 4th year? This question I read in a newspaper column yesterday, and heard some businessmen asking me in recent weeks about "irrational exuberance" or "stocks too high?"

My opinions? I hope no "crash", but just occasional corrections are healthy. The Philippine economy is doing good, and we have positive prospects. Asia is also flourishing. However, uncertainties remain in the older economic powers of still struggling USA economy, a stagnant Japan economy and a still problematic Western Europe....

Is this question of a possible or imminent "crash" due to speculative fever in our stock market? Is the seemingly nonstop and record-breaking zooming of stock prices sustainable, realistic?

Indeed, if more people buy into the hype on unstoppable stocks boom, then stocks can get valued higher than they should really be, then some dangers may be possible and should be avoided?

The so-called "hot money" or footloose investment funds in the stock market can vanish or run way in split seconds or overnight, affected by the vagaries of human emotions, fears, greed, and sheer exuberance?

Of course a strong stock market is good news for the Philippine economy, but what about speculations?

How can we have a stronger, more broad-based, stable and healthier Philippine stock market?


(Image below sourced from seekingalpha.com)

(Image below of speculator cartoon sourced from econintersect.com)

(Image below sourced from stock-market-crash.net)




(Image below sourced from 123rf.com)





(Image below sourced from investmentpostcards.com)






(Image below sourced from sniper.at)




(Image below sourced from georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu)





(Image below sourced from seekingalpha.com)

 

MONEY MATTERS

Is the PH stock market going to crash soon?

By Henry Ong, Philippine Daily Inquirer

1:30 am | Thursday, January 10th, 2013

Question: Many are optimistic that the stock market will continue to be bullish this year with the index likely to reach an all-time high of 6,500. While this is definitely good news, I am beginning to feel uncomfortable as share prices are already very high. I am not sure if I should buy more or start selling at the current level. Can you advise me?—Gigi F. by e-mail

Answer: If you want to take advantage of the current bullish momentum, you can trade for short-term gain by buying one of the most active stocks and sell it immediately as soon it makes a profit.

This is actually fun but it be can be risky. If the stock fails to move up as expected, you may have to sell it at a loss to recover your cash at once. If you choose to hold on to it in the hope that the stock will improve later, you may risk losing more if the stock suddenly takes a sharp fall.

While it is true that the market enjoys strong economic fundamentals and liquidity flows, the potential for further upside at the moment may be limited as stocks have become expensive by Price-to-Earnings (P/E) valuation.

In fact, the Philippine market, which has market P/E of 19x is relatively more expensive than Singapore or Hong Kong, which has market P/E of only about 12x. To justify the current share prices, corporate earnings must demonstrate exceptional earnings growth to bring down P/E valuations.

If you are deciding whether to buy or sell, consider analyzing this from a risk and reward ratio. Let’s assume the market falls from its current level of 6,055, the immediate support would be 5,866, which gives a 3.1-percent loss. If, on the other hand, the market continues its uptrend and the first resistance is 6,130, you will get 1.2 percent return.

If the probability is high that the market will stop at 6,130, it may not be a good idea to buy at this point because you will risk more in order to gain. It will be wise to start taking profits on some stocks, especially those that have become expensive and invest the cash proceeds to cheaper stocks or simply keep it at the bank until another opportunity arises.

If the prospect of further upside is limited, does this mean that the market may crash soon?

Not necessarily. It only means that the current uptrend may be reaching its terminal phase because share prices are trading well above their underlying values caused by market traders who are bidding shares based on overly optimistic earnings assumptions.

The index must eventually correct itself by falling to levels acceptable to the market. It can fall by as much as 10 percent over a period of time.  Corrections are inevitable. What goes up must come down.

In a bull market scenario, any price dip is considered temporary because you expect the stock to recover again. In fact, it is during this time when you take the opportunity to buy back stocks at a lower price for another market run-up. However, if the trend has reversed, any share price rally will be minimal and the selling will continue and possibly accelerate the market downwards.

Do you know that a bull market lasts for three to four years? Our current bull run actually started last March 2009 and it will be celebrating its 4th anniversary this March 2013. Could the end of the bull market be near?

No one knows when this will happen but there are signs that the market is ripe for massive correction. Do you see more of your friends now talking about stock market than in the previous years? Do you see people discussing about stocks more than usual at Facebook, Twitter or online forums? Do you hear radio and TV shows discussing about opportunities in stock market more often than before? Are newspapers featuring stock market news or stories on the front page? Are brokers and fund managers making bold forecast that the index may reach 7,000 level this year?

As more people talk about making money from stocks, more people will get into the market hoping that they will also make a fortune. As buying of stocks increases, people will be chasing stocks and drive share prices above their intrinsic values. Market psychology will tell you that this could be a sign that the party will be over soon.


This is the best time for you to assess your portfolio and evaluate your positions. You may have to reallocate some of your stock investments into other assets for the moment as you wait for the market to correct.
Yes, you will probably feel some regrets as you say goodbye to your favorite stocks for now especially if you see the stock continue rising after you have sold it. There is no way you can catch the market top and maximize your profit. Start selling gradually. Sell while it feels good.


Do not wait for the market to fall before you start selling. You may not be able to sell it at the price you want because you will be rushing to sell down for fear that the share prices may go lower.


Just like the perfect punch that knocked out the “Pacman,” it only takes a single bad news to knock this market down so be careful and watchful.


(Image below sourced from coedmagazine.com)

Kudos to Asia! Apple, Inc. boss just said that booming China will soon surpass USA as the world's biggest market! Let us all work harder to help our entire region to benefit from unprecedented economic progress!

We are truly witnessing the rise of a new world order in the 21st century, of the resurgence of Asia again as the center of world civilization, socio-economic progress and hopefully long-term harmony as well.

Apple CEO Cook Says China Will Overtake U.S. as Biggest Market

By Bloomberg News - Jan 11, 2013 10:27 AM GMT+0800

Play

Apple CEO Cook Meets with China Mobile Chairman

 

 

Apple Inc. (AAPL) Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said China will overtake the U.S. to become its largest market, as the iPhone-maker adds more stores and considers debuting new products in the country.

Apple CEO Cook Says China Will Overtake U.S. as Biggest Market

Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

Pedestrians walks past an Apple Inc. store in Beijing, China. Apple intends to open “many more” outlets in China over the next several years, Cook said in the Xinhua interview. The company now has 11 stores in China and Hong Kong.

 

Pedestrians walks past an Apple Inc. store in Beijing, China. Apple intends to open “many more” outlets in China over the next several years, Cook said in the Xinhua interview. The company now has 11 stores in China and Hong Kong. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

Apple’s Cook Discusses Cooperation With China Mobile Chairman

Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

A worker walks past the Apple Inc. logo in the Sanlitun area of Beijing, China.

A worker walks past the Apple Inc. logo in the Sanlitun area of Beijing, China. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

Enlarge image

China Mobile chairman Xi Guohua

Jerome Favre/Bloomberg

Xi Guohua, chairman of China Mobile Ltd.

Xi Guohua, chairman of China Mobile Ltd. Photographer: Jerome Favre/Bloomberg

“I believe it will become our first,” Cook said in an interview with state-owned Xinhua News yesterday. No timeframe was given for the prediction. The Cupertino, California-based company had $5.7 billion of sales in China during the quarter ended September. U.S. revenue was about $14.4 billion, based on figures in an Oct. 25 earnings statement.

Cook also met the chairman of China Mobile Ltd. (941) while in the country, as he seeks to boost cooperation with a wireless operator that has 707 million customers and no agreement to sell iPhones. The CEO is making his second visit to the country in less than a year as Apple tries to reverse its shrinking share of the local smartphone market.

Apple intends to open “many more” outlets in China over the next several years, Cook said in the Xinhua interview. The company now has 11 stores in China and Hong Kong.

Cook also said he would also “love” to introduce new products in China first, according to the report. The iPhone 5 was released in China in December, almost three months after the U.S. introduction.

China Growth

The company’s growth in the world’s most populous nation has been limited by it only working with smaller carriers and competition from domestic phone-makers. Its share of the nation’s smartphone market slipped to sixth from fourth in the third quarter, according to researcher IDC.

Yesterday, Cook met with Xi Guohua, the chairman on China Mobile at the carrier’s headquarters in Beijing. The two discussed “cooperation,” according to a statement from China Mobile, the world’s largest wireless operator by subscribers. It didn’t elaborate.

China Mobile, which accounts for 64 percent of the nation’s mobile users, said last month that it needs to reach agreements on benefit-sharing with Apple before it can begin offering iPhones. The operator also has a homegrown third-generation network that isn’t used by other carriers.

Apple distributes iPhone with the nation’s second- and third-largest carriers: China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. (762) and China Telecom Corp. (728)

100 million Christians persecuted worldwide, shocking, what are the rest of us Christians doing?

It is so sad to hear Christians being persecuted. I am for respect for all religions.

Let us---whatever our faith---hope, pray and work for protection of Christians and peoples of other faiths from religious persecutions or oppression!

Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world today, this is a tragedy, let us change this situation.

***

(Christians in Syria. This image below sourced from worldcruch.com)





(St. John’s Church, Gojra---near Faisalabad---was established on November 18, 1913 in Pakistan. Image below of this church sourced from tribune.com.pk)







(Image of Christian minority in war-torn Syria, sourced from independent.co.uk)






(Below is image of the February 13, 2012 Newsweek cover story on the Christian minority in India)




Read the news report below:

About 100 million Christians persecuted around the world: report

 

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

PARIS | Tue Jan 8, 2013 11:41pm IST

PARIS (Reuters) - About 100 million Christians are persecuted around the world, with conditions worsening for them most rapidly in Syria and Ethiopia, according to an annual report by a group supporting oppressed Christians worldwide.
Open Doors, a non-denominational Christian group, listed North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan as the three toughest countries for Christians last year. They topped the 50-country ranking for 2011 as well.
Syria jumped from 36th to 11th place on the list as its Christian minority, first suspected by rebels of close ties to the Assad government, has increasingly become a target for radical Islamist fighters, the report said.

Ethiopia, which is two-thirds Christian, shot up from 38th to 15th place in the ranking due to a "complex mix of persecution dynamics" including attacks by radical Islamists and reprisals by traditional Christians against new Protestant movements.

Mali came from no listing for 2011 to 7th place because the sharia rule the Islamist Ansar Dine group imposed on the north of the country not only brought harsh punishments for the Muslim majority but also drove the tiny Christian minority, it said.

"There are over 65 countries where Christians are persecuted," said the report released on Tuesday by Open Doors, which began in the 1950s smuggling Bibles into communist states and now works in more than 60 countries.

"An estimated 100 million Christians worldwide are persecuted," the United States-based group said in the report. All but one of the 50 countries in the list - Colombia, which ranked 46th - were in Africa, Asia or the Middle East.

Christianity is the largest and most widely spread faith in the world, with 2.2 billion followers or 32 percent of the world population, according to a report by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

It faces restrictions and hostility in 111 countries around the world, ahead of the 90 countries limiting or harassing the second-largest faith, Islam, another Pew report said.

"In recent years, we've been hearing that Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world - that sounds right to us," said Open Doors France director Michel Varton at a presentation of the report in Strasbourg.

PERSECUTION

Leaders of various denominations - including Pope Benedict, whose Roman Catholic followers account for more than half of all Christians - increasingly make this accusation.

It may well be the case given Christianity's size and global spread, but it is hard to produce enough reliable comparative statistics to give it a solid empirical basis.

Some German politicians and human rights groups criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel last November for saying this at a Protestant Church conference there, saying it was pointless to try to rank religions according to how persecuted they were.

Open Doors, which documents cases of persecution of Christians, said its report was based on official studies, news reports and field reports and questionnaires filled out by its staff workers around the world.

Of the top 10 countries on the list - North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Maldives, Mali, Iran, Yemen and Eritrea - eight are majority Muslim states threatened by what Open Doors called "Islamic extremism".

North Korea has kept its number one ranking for the past 11 years because it is illegal simply to be a Christian there, it said. Open Doors estimates that up to 70,000 North Koreans have been sent to labor camps for their faith.

The report said second-placed Saudi Arabia, which bans public practice of any faith but Islam, has a growing Christian population because of its migrant workers and some converts it says converted after watching Christian satellite television.

"Christians risk further persecution and oppression in the future due to the rising number of converts and their boldness in sharing their faith," it said.

(Additional reporting by Gilbert Reilhac in Strasbourg; Editing by Alison Williams)

The Philippines has too many guns! Let us campaign for GUN BAN nationwide, especially loose, unlicensed, expired and illegal firearms! Let us end this GUN CULTURE, starting with Mindanao!

Whether in the Philippines or in the United States of America (USA), I am for GUN BAN!

Latest statistics I saw today in GMA 7 News, shocking, disgusting, infuriating these numbers below!

328,320 loose firearms; 528,485 expired/not renewed firearms; 1,620,948 licensed firearms (Source: Philippine National Police or PNP)


(Image below sourced from samuelatgilgal.wordpress.com)





(Image below sourced from opednews.com)

Amalayer comes out in Philippine spoof of Gangnam Style! (Don't forget to click video below! Suggest you share your comments way way down below after the video....)

Humor is one of the great natural resources of the Philippines and for centuries a survival mechanism of the Filipino people against Spanish (also briefly Japanese) colonial oppression as well as against 20th century political shennanigans of local overlords.

Spoof of South Korea's Oppa Gangnam Style, watch and listen to this funny and fun Philippine parody called "Opo Pinoy Style".

Apart from highlighting various Philippine cultural and other features as well as idiosyncracies, my La Consolacion College Manila student Paula Jamie Salvosa well-known for the 2012 viral video "Amalayer" is also featured twice in this hilarious, entertaining and ingenious video by Filipino-Canadian Mikey Bustos.

Paging the Department of Tourism (DOT), this is better than any of your promotional videos or advertisements about the Philippines!

Read this report from Yahoo News:

http://ph.news.yahoo.com/-amalayer--girl-bounces-back-with-new-viral-video-082050336.html

'Amalayer' girl bounces back with new viral video

By Kim Arveen Patria | Yahoo! Southeast Asia Newsroom – 1 hour 15 minutes ago

• 
  Paula Jamie Salvosa, who once drew online flak for berating a security guard, is now featured in another viral video, which rides on the global popularity of pop hit 'Gangnam Style' to highlight Pinoy pride. …more 

Once the object of online criticism for a video which showed her berating a security guard, "Amalayer Girl" Paula Jamie Salvosa is now back on netizens' radar.

Salvosa is now featured in another viral video, which rides on the global popularity of pop hit "Gangnam Style" to highlight Pinoy pride.

The video entitled "Opo Pinoy Style" was produced by HeadingUp Productions and Filipino-Canadian artist Mikey Bustos.

Viewed nearly 800,000 times as of writing since it was posted Jan. 4, the video underscores Pinoy tourist spots, food, traditions and even idiosyncracies.

"Opo", the Filipino way of saying yes respectfully or when addressing elders, replaces "Oppa" in the Psy's original video, which means "older brother" in Korean.

Salvosa, who now apparently has embraced online fame, appears in the video mouthing "Amalayer," a term coined when her video spread like wildfire online in November.

Dangers of Twitter, Facebook: Beware!

Is technology---in particular the ubiquituous social media---sapping our productivity, our physical and social health, our ability to live better quality of life if we use them wrongly? These are serious questions we as human beings of the 21st century should ponder on carefully and address in this 21st century? Let us change for the better, not worse!

Here's a thought-provoking Bloomberg column (below) by Caroline Baum which expresses a lot of my concerns. Baum has a B.A. in political science from Tufts University and an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University. She lives in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, United States of America.

 

Twitter Saps Productivity, Facebook Makes You Fat

By Caroline Baum Dec 27, 2012 7:30 AM GMT+0800 Bloomberg

Ever since the invention of the wheel in Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C., technological innovation has been improving our lives. Because new devices and processes help us produce more (output) with less (labor input), prices fall, real wages rise and we are all better off. If there is a free lunch in this world, it’s productivity growth.

(Image below sourced from Msshawnblog.blogspot.com)



There is even an economic school of thought, known as real business cycle theory, which views technology shocks as the main driver of the business cycle: not the central bank, not fiscal policy, not animal spirits or expectations.

 

Technology, in fact, is always equated with good: More is better.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for progress, but I keep wondering if some of the latest innovations are productivity- enhancing or just a pure waste of time.

For example, every time I’m in Manhattan, I marvel at the number of people crossing the street or sitting down to lunch with a friend without taking their eyes and fingers off their electronic devices. I can even predict the effect such interconnectivity will have on the individual psyche. Twenty years from now, sociologists and psychologists will publish studies about how the teenagers of today, addicted as they are to texting abbreviated word forms, have trouble relating to one another. Educators will bemoan the inability of the youth of America to write.

(Image below sourced from article.wn.com)

‘Alone Together’

I didn’t have to wait 20 years. Sherry Turkle, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described this phenomenon perfectly in an April 21 New York Times article titled, “The Flight from Conversation.” She called it “alone together.” It encapsulated everything I had been thinking about for years.

“We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating,” Turkle, a psychologist, wrote. “And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.”

(Image below sourced from businessinsider.com)





Social networking is just such an alone-together pursuit. Last year, Bloomberg journalists were encouraged to set up Twitter accounts. I reluctantly complied. I don’t have a Facebook page, was never tempted to create one and didn’t understand the value of letting friends know that I was eating a peach or walking the dog.

At first I restricted my tweets to my column and blog posts. I never looked at Twitter in between. Then I started interacting with people, and it became contagious, more like a game. Who was retweeting my posts?

How many followers did each tweet produce? What was my tweet-to-follower ratio? My most attention-grabbing tweet was something snarky I wrote on Nov. 14 during L’Affaire Petraeus: “Both Petraeus & Broadwell were married. Yet now she’s his ‘mistress.’ Do we have an equivalent word in English for him?”

I got dozens of suggestions and 50 new followers. But what was the value? It seemed like a huge distraction from my work. If we as a nation are twittering or frittering our lives away, surely it must be manifesting itself in the statistics.

To find the answer, I decided to go to the source on labor productivity: the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I asked one of the economists who works in that division if he could help me determine how my personal productivity was being affected by tweeting. Once I became an expert, I was sure I could extrapolate the results to the universe at large.

You probably guessed: It’s not that easy. In its monthly calculation of output per hour worked, or productivity, the BLS uses revenue, or nominal sales, as a proxy for output. That revenue is then adjusted for price changes.

Total hours worked, which businesses report to the BLS each month, is used as a proxy for labor input. Productivity is computed from the two numbers.

Unadjusted Quality

What about the effect on the quality of my work? If I’m spending more time tweeting and less researching and writing my column, surely the quality suffers.

Goods can be adjusted for quality changes: something the BLS does each month to determine what part of the change in the price of a consumer good is due to improved quality. It’s harder with services industries and is almost impossible for my output. (Readers, however, have no problem providing instantaneous qualitative assessment: It stinks.)

The good news is, until my slacking off starts to affect Bloomberg LP’s sales, my personal productivity isn’t captured in the statistics. The bad news is, I may lose my job.

The difficulty of capturing the Twitter effect in the aggregate data notwithstanding, the productivity-sapping side of social networking doesn’t stop there. A recent study by Keith Wilcox, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School, found that Facebook was making people fat. Yes, fat. It seems that social networking improves self-esteem and, in so doing, reduces control over our choice of snacks.

The study said nothing about the effect on productivity. That’s a leap I’m taking. To the extent that obesity and its secondary effects require treatment, it means less time devoted to work.

Does that make sense? I think I will share that idea with my Twitter followers and see what they think. Then I’ll get back to work.


(Image below of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sourced from shinyshiny.tv)





(Caroline Baum, author of “Just What I Said,” is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

Senator John Kerry would make an ideal U.S. Secretary of State due to his cosmopolitan and liberal mindset, opposite that of his former political rival ex-President George W. Bush who was jingoistic.

Although he is a bemedalled hero of the Vietnam War, he eventually made a courageous stand based on his moral principles and objective analyses to eventually oppose the Vietnam War. He also opposed the Iraq War of George W. Bush. He is a highly-educated and intellident leader, an ideal diplomat for peace in the world.

(This image sourced from esquire.com)





(This image sourced from vanityfair.com)

Obama Turns to Global Traveler Kerry This Time Around

By Laura Litvan - Dec 22, 2012 3:56 AM GMT+0800 Bloomberg.com

Months after passing over Senator John Kerry for a Cabinet post in 2009, President Barack Obama turned to the Massachusetts senator to warn Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai that U.S. support was at risk.
The Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee coaxed Karzai into agreeing to a runoff after a contested presidential election. Kerry “made the kind of difference diplomacy can make,” Michael Mandelbaum, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, said in an interview.

Enlarge image

Senator John Kerry

Scott Eells/Bloomberg

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Sudan and China, Kerry, 69, has made at least 30 trips abroad over the past four years, often serving as an unofficial special envoy for the Obama administration.

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Sudan and China, Kerry, 69, has made at least 30 trips abroad over the past four years, often serving as an unofficial special envoy for the Obama administration. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg

6:52

Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama named Massachusetts Senator John Kerry as his choice to become the next U.S. secretary of state during a news conference in Washington. The nomination of Kerry, 69, a Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is subject to Senate confirmation. (Source: Bloomberg)

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Sudan and China, Kerry, 69, has made at least 30 trips abroad over the past four years, often serving as an unofficial special envoy for the Obama administration. Today, the president made it official, saying he will nominate Kerry to replace the departing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

“Over these many years, John’s earned the respect and confidence of leaders around the world,” Obama said, with Kerry at his side at the White House. “He is not going to need a lot of on-the-job training.”
Republican colleagues predicted in advance of Kerry’s nomination that he would easily win Senate confirmation.

“I don’t foresee a big obstacle,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who will become the No. 2 Republican leader in January, said in an interview. “He’s been a good and effective senator.”

Patrician Manner

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who first became known nationally as a critic of that war, has been steeped in foreign policy issues throughout his career. Traits Republicans ridiculed in his failed presidential campaign in 2004 -- his patrician manner, his fine-grained parsing of language, even his occasional tendency to lapse into French to choose the mot juste -- may wear well on the international diplomatic circuit.

Kerry will be able to follow in the footsteps of Clinton, who is effective partly because she’s a well-known figure globally, according to Joseph Nye, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kerry is “a distinguished senator and he’s seen as having a political presence of his own, which is very helpful,” Nye, a former Defense and State Department official who has known Kerry for 20 years, said in an interview.

On foreign policy, Kerry shares Obama’s preference for working through multinational alliances and for avoiding open- ended engagement, such as the Iraq war they both opposed.

“Ideologically, he and the president are in a very similar place,” James Carafano, vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, said in an interview.

Syria Caution

Kerry’s approach to U.S. intervention abroad has been reflected in his comments on the war in Syria, where he has shared Obama’s reluctance about direct military involvement.

“It would be important not to repeat the mistakes of the past by thinking we can just willy-nilly commit some forces to a conflict without a definition or achievable objective,” Kerry said at a committee hearing on Aug. 1.
Kerry and Obama have political bonds dating to 2004, when the senator gave Obama his breakthrough opportunity as the keynote speaker at the Democratic convention that nominated Kerry for president. The speech turned Obama, a state senator from Illinois running for the U.S. Senate, into a national political star.

Clinton Chosen

In 2008, Kerry backed Obama over front-runner Clinton in the Democratic presidential primaries, only to see Obama reach out and choose Clinton as his first-term secretary of state. In this year’s presidential campaign, Obama prepared for debates with Kerry playing the role of Republican opponent Mitt Romney.
“Nothing brings two people closer together than weeks of debate prep,” Obama said today.

After graduating from Yale University, Kerry volunteered for the Navy. In two tours of duty in Vietnam, he rose to the rank of lieutenant and served on a Swift Boat that traveled treacherous river deltas. He was decorated with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.

“Having served with valor in Vietnam, he understands that we have a responsibility to use American power wisely, especially our military power,” Obama said today.

Kerry came to see the war he fought as futile, and on his return to the U.S. he became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

‘Last to Die’

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Kerry said in April 1971, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he would one day lead. On that visit to Washington, he joined other veterans who threw their medals and ribbons over a fence at the Capitol to protest the war.

Kerry made an unsuccessful bid for a House seat from Massachusetts the following year, then worked as a prosecutor before being elected lieutenant governor in 1982 and senator in 1984. For years, he was overshadowed in Washington by the state’s senior senator, Edward M. Kennedy, who died in 2009.

In the 2004 presidential campaign, Republicans portrayed Kerry as flip-flopping on funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They seized on his comment in March 2004 that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

Kerry said his “inarticulate” phrasing referred to his support for an unsuccessful Democratic alternative that would have offset war costs by reducing Bush’s tax cuts.

Among Wealthiest

Largely because of the wealth of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Kerry is one of the richest members of Congress. His net worth was at least $181.5 million in 2011, according to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington.

Kerry and Senator John McCain, a fellow Vietnam veteran, traveled to Hanoi in 1993. They visited the prison where McCain was held as a prisoner of war for six years. Kerry and McCain, an Arizona Republican, worked together for the normalization of Vietnam-U.S. relations that occurred two years later.
Kerry became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, when Joe Biden left the post to become Obama’s vice president.

In February 2009, Kerry was the highest-level U.S. official to visit the Gaza Strip since Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007. He didn’t meet with Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the U.S. and the European Union.

Afghanistan Dinners

On his visit to Afghanistan in 2009, Kerry met with Karzai five times over five days, including twice over dinner, to broker the terms of a runoff election. Obama later said Kerry was “extraordinarily constructive and very helpful.”

In May 2011, Kerry was the first high-level U.S. official to visit Pakistan amid bilateral strains following the May 2 killing there of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy SEALs.

At the Capitol, Kerry worked with the Foreign Relations panel’s top Republican, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, on issues such as a strategic arms control treaty with Russia that they ushered through the chamber in December 2010.

Kerry tried unsuccessfully to push through the Senate legislation intended to curb global climate change. As secretary of state, Kerry may be able to revive interest in the subject as “the recession recedes and you’ve more reminders like Hurricane Sandy,” Nye said.

Kerry also may help negotiate a “status of forces agreement” for U.S. forces to maintain a role in Afghanistan after most troops are withdrawn in 2014, Nye said.

Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who is in line to replace Lugar as top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee next month, said Kerry is clearly qualified for the Cabinet post.

“He’s lived a life of involvement in diplomacy and issues related to foreign relations,” Corker said.