SHOCKER: Crony Capitalist Obama Pays Back Crony Capitalist Buffett With Keystone Pipeline Denial

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The State of the Union video feed can be accessed, while available, by clicking on the magical picture below.

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Full article

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…and the pundits on t.v. told you to sell over the past two days….HAH

Cheers to all holders !!!

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NSC reported $1.42 vs consensus of $1.40…stock off in A.H.

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CA post $0.65 vs consensus of $0.54

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Super wow…stock halted

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Apple prelim $13.87 vs $10.08 Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; revs $46.33 bln vs $39.04 bln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate

Apple sees Q2 EPS of ~$8.50 vs $8.00 Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; sees revs ~$32.5 bln vs $31.94 bln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate (420.41 -7.00)

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Text and theme song

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For real ?

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You go and change shit up !

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A much better electoral race for sure…..

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The Federal Reserve will release its latest policy statement tomorrow afternoon, shortly after which Chairman Ben Bernanke will hold his quarterly press conference. Unlike the obfuscation that characterized the Greenspan era, Chairman Ben loves to verbally get down with the common man, becoming increasingly transparent as his term has progressed.

Increased openness isn’t the only change at the Fed. This is the first meeting for two new voting FOMC members as well as the launch of a program in which each voter actually gives their own economic forecast. “It’s a lot of new information from the Fed,” understates Jim Bianco, president of Bianco Research, in the attached clip.

Given how closely every utterance from the Fed is scrutinized, the increased transparency is apt to be a mixed blessing for traders, at least in the near-term.

“The history of Fed transparency has become very clear,” says Bianco. “Every time the Fed comes up with a new scheme to increase transparency, the market misreads it; the market reads into things that aren’t there and they overreact or they under-react.”

For less active traders the main question is whether or not “QE3” –or another round of quantitative easing– is in the cards.

Bianco says it won’t be tomorrow’s business but an additional round of the stock market’s favorite form of stimulus remains in play.

“QE3 has a less than 50% chance of happening; not completely dead but not completely on,” he predicts. Basically, another round of QE will stay in reserve just in case the economy starts slowing once more.

As for the press conference, if Bianco could hear just one thing from Bernanke it would be a definitive answer to the above-mentioned conflict between time or inflation targeting. Bianco says Bernanke is a closeted inflation target guy. That being the case, Bianco’s dream statement from Bernanke would be a definitive statement of the specific level to watch.

“If the inflation rate goes above this level we tighten, if it goes below this level we ease, and if stays in the middle we do nothing,” he says.

When economists dream, they want to know about price targeting. When traders dream, they generally want a huge knee jerk reaction so they can move to the other side. When normal human beings dream, they’d rather they didn’t have to listen to the Federal Reserve at all.

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Yaho comes in with $0.24 per share on $1.17 Billion in revenues vs consensus of $1.2 billion

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You can almost hear the catchy notes from the musical “Guys and Dolls” as the U.S. banking sector struggles to put its troubled past behind it.

More than four years have elapsed since the bursting of a housing bubble that caused a devastating financial crisis, but its alleged victims and perpetrators—there is overlap between the categories—are still fighting over the spoils.

Federal and state regulators, consumer groups, large investors and government-owned agencies are pursuing multibillion-dollar claims against banks over the mortgage mess.

“I have never seen anything like this in my career,” the veteran lawyer Andrew L. Sandler, chairman and executive partner of Buckley Sandler, told me. “Everybody is going after each other: consumers, investors, regulators. This focus on blame rather than solutions is not going to solve the problem.”

The result: Legal issues are contributing to the disarray in the housing market, weighing down financial groups with huge provisions for potential losses and bamboozling an investor community already fretting about banks’ returns and business models.

Maybe, just maybe, in the next month or so, large lenders will finally settle most state and federal probes into alleged foreclosure improprieties. But even that long-awaited package of concessions and fines, possibly worth some $20 billion, won’t be enough to spell the end of the legal morass.

Lawsuits from the private sector will continue for years. Rules introduced since the turmoil, such as a controversial cap on debit-card fees, are spawning fresh litigation. New watchdogs, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, are sharpening their legal knives.

A Wall Street executive put it best: “Banks have become the Big Tobacco of the modern era: a large target with big pockets for people to sue.” But with much smaller margins in their core business, I would add.

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The market took an early morning tumble of about 100 DOW points only to close down 33 points.

Greek debt talks started the negativity in Europe, but it could not hurt the Teflon of U.S. markets.

NASDAQ up 3

S&P down 1

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFHQcLHKFHM 450 300]

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If the theme of tonight’s State of the Union address is fairness, then President Obama would be wise to steer clear of housing; most of the proposals to fix the nation’s still struggling real estate market are intrinsically unfair to a large majority of Americans.

From a mass refinance plan to mass mortgage principal forgiveness, the supposed “fixes” will reward some at the expense of far more.

Let’s start with that principal forgiveness. Some Democrats have been hounding the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the FHFA and its leader Ed DeMarco) to initiate a program to reduce the value of mortgages where the mortgage is larger than the value of the home, i.e. “underwater”. The idea is that this will keep those borrowers from defaulting on these mortgages.

DeMarco is against this, so Democrats, or at least Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, went so far as to request proof of Demarco’s contention that such a program would do more harm than good. This after the Federal Reserve officials, in a recent “White Paper,” suggested, “some actions that cause greater losses to be sustained by the [GSE’s] in the near term might be in the interest of taxpayers to pursue if those actions result in a quicker and more vigorous economic recovery.”

The losses to Fannie and Freddie, according to DeMarco, would be somewhere around $100 billion, if they were to write down principal on all 3 million underwater mortgages backed by the two. That money, DeMarco noted in a letter back to the Congressman, would come from taxpayers, who have already footed a $150 billion bill from Fannie and Freddie.

Then there’s that pesky refi plan that’s been floating around for a few years now. The idea is that Fannie and Freddie would refinance about 14 million of their own borrowers to 4 percent or less, as long as the borrowers are current on their loans. This would supposedly juice the economy with household savings of about $36 billion a year. Administration officials have already told me they are not considering such a program as it is too expensive in too many ways. And then there’s that fairness issue again, as in why should the government fund refinances for borrowers with Fannie and Freddie loans but not for the other half of American borrowers who don’t have Fannie and Freddie loans?

We can, however, look for the president to say something about the current expansion of the government’s refinance program for underwater borrowers, and we’re eager to hear how he thinks it’s going, given that it has fallen under harsh criticism for helping too few borrowers. Perhaps he might want to change/expand that program, but then again details are not exactly popular in State of the Union addresses historically.

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Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Charles Plosser was answering reporters’ questions two weeks ago when he paused to seek their assistance on the Fed’s campaign to open up to the public.

“Help me out here,” Plosser said after a Jan. 11 speech in Rochester, New York. “There’s a huge confusion about this,” he said, referring to Fed plans to start releasing policy makers’ forecasts for the benchmark interest rate tomorrow.

Plosser said he was concerned investors might misinterpret the projections as a pledge to keep borrowing costs low for a specified period. That could make it harder for the central bank to raise interest rates should the need arise, said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut.

“It’s not at all clear how people are supposed to react” to the Fed’s new communications policy, Stanley said. “If it does start to take on that sense of being a commitment,” he said, “it runs a great risk in terms of their credibility when they end up not being able to stick to it.”

The Federal Open Market Committee plans to release all 17 policy makers’ rate projections for the fourth quarter of 2012, the next few years and the long run, as well as an explanation for their assessments. The Fed will provide the information at the conclusion of a two-day meeting tomorrow. The FOMC convened today at about 10 a.m.

Views Voiced

The decision to announce the projections is the latest effort by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke to increase openness and public understanding of the Fed. Since becoming chairman in 2006, Bernanke has begun holding regular press conferences and voiced his views in television interviews and at town hall meetings. He’s also announced forecasts on economic growth, unemployment and inflation four times a year, up from twice annually under his predecessor, Alan Greenspan.

Chicago Fed President Charles Evans, who this month reiterated his call for adding more stimulus, said on Jan. 13 that the central bank’s “enhanced communications” mark a “substantial, first-order improvement” over the Fed’s previous efforts. Publishing the projections will help the public better evaluate the committee’s views, while allowing monetary policy to “respond more strongly in the medium-term when adverse economic shocks impede growth and employment,” he said.

Policy makers want to telegraph their expectations for the appropriate path for the overnight lending rate between banks, Plosser said. That shouldn’t be confused as a commitment on the level of interest rates.

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In some ways it seems fitting – even telling – that the hottest stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the past year comes down with a cold during January earnings season. It would be hard to say that McDonald’s (MCD) did anything wrong given the $27.2 billion record high revenues raked in last year, as well as record net income of $5.5 billion.

And despite beating bottom line estimates by 3-cents and matching sales, McDonald’s shares are shedding more than 2% on the news.

It should be pointed out that the fast-food giant’s decline is from a record high that was attained, as Macke says in the attached clip, through “perennial out-performance that warms my cockles of heart.”

From my standpoint, it is for that very same reason that this super-sized $100 billion business looks increasingly ripe to disappoint. It may be years away, or as soon as next quarter, but the burger baron is on a roll and its trajectory over the past year looks unsustainably steep, making its premium P/E ratio of 19 times 2012 estimates more difficult to justify because the fry oil is heating up.

Verizon (VZ) also reported record revenue growth today that matched expectations, but its muddled path to an ex-items bottom line miss by a penny is cause for concern in some circles.

“Ex-items are not all created equally, and VZ’s ex-items make sense,” Macke says.

What he is referring to is a net loss that came as the result of pension obligations, a legacy problem from the dark days that masks the sizzle of smartphones – which Verizon sold a lot of, and spent a lot doing so. Officially, 56% of 7.7 million smartphones it sold were iPhones (which means 44% weren’t), which drove 13% and 19% growth in its wireless and data businesses.

The other silver lining in this Macke-branded “consumer/utility/IT play” is every dip drives its dividend higher, which at last check was yielding 5.3%, which happens to be about 2.5-times the take on a 10-year Treasury.

And finally, we tear apart Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), the global healthcare conglomerate who’s defensive appeal outweighs its 4% sales growth. J&J comfortably beat on the bottom line with EPS of $1.13 versus $1.09 estimates. While its aforementioned low-single-digit revenue growth met analysts targets, a 10% jump in foreign sales was able to mask a 3.4% slide on the domestic side.

J&J is also one of the few to give full year guidance today. They guided cautiously on 2012, looking for $5.00 – $5.15 per share versus consensus at $5.21.

While Verizon and AT&T pay larger dividends, the fact that J&J is one of only four U.S. companies t0 carry a AAA-rating makes its 3.5% yield even more appealing. As does the fact that if and when they increase it again in April, it will mark the 50th consecutive year they have raised their dividend.

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