Global Markets & U.S. Futures Reach For Greener Pastures

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Europe

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LIBOR, EURIBOR, 10 year yields for Italy, Spain, France, and Germany

Over the past weeks Megaupload has been looking into the various options they have to grant users temporary access. Interestingly enough, this quest revealed that many accounts are held by US Government officials.

“Guess what – we found a large number of Mega accounts from US Government officials including the Department of Justice and the US Senate.”

“I hope we will soon have permission to give them and the rest of our users access to their files,” Dotcom told us.

Read the rest here.

by firstadopter

I believe the market is underestimating the deteriorating underlying business trends, the impact of the secular shift of physical media to digital media along with the competition risk from Apple and Google, and the weak positioning of Amazon’s hardware tablet strategy.

To read the rest and see the charts, go here.

via Crossing Wall Street

How’s that for an eye-catching title?

But seriously, let’s take a look. Below is a chart of the S&P 500 along with its earnings. The index is the black line and it follows the left scale. The earnings is the yellow line and it follows the right scale.

Read the rest here.

It is clear from looking at the current landscape that volatility is rapidly becoming a key focus for asset management. Witness the birth of “low-volatility” ETFs and the popularity of minimum-variance portfolios borne from empirical studies that demonstrate their superior performance to alternative methodologies.  It seems obvious from the research that volatility is an important factor to consider in portfolio management, but it is neccessary to understand why this is the case.

Read the rest here.

This is the inevitable conclusion from looking at the state of the labour market today. It is a shambles.

Watch the video. You’ll never guess who is on the record calling this guy his “favorite congressman.”

No wonder there is so much violence int he fast food places….

Let’s see if this goes anywhere…NOT

“The Fed just announced that the latest round of bank stress tests will come out Thursday at 4:30 PM ET.

As a reminder, this is the doom scenario banks will be stress tested again:

The supervisory stress scenario for CCAR 2012, which was designed in November 2011, depicts a severe recession in the United States, including a peak unemployment rate of 13 percent, a 50 percent drop in equity prices, and a 21 percent decline in housing prices. The supervisory stress scenario is not the Federal Reserve’s forecast for the economy, but was designed to represent an outcome that, while unlikely, may occur if the U.S economy were to experience a deep recession at the same time that economic activity in other major economies contracted significantly.

More from the Fed announcement:

The Federal Reserve evaluates institutions’ capital plans across a range of criteria, including a stress test that examines whether a firm could make all the capital distributions included in its plan–such as dividends and stock repurchases–while still maintaining capital above the Federal Reserve’s standards in a hypothetical supervisory stress scenario. Other considerations for capital distributions include an evaluation of the firms’ capital planning processes and plans to meet international capital agreements as new requirements are phased in beginning in 2013. The stress-test results, including projected capital ratios, revenues, and losses in the supervisory stress scenario, will be disclosed for the 19 large bank holding companies that participated.

To illustrate the impact of the stress scenario alone, the Federal Reserve also calculated stressed capital ratios including planned capital actions through March 31, 2012, but excluding proposed actions for the remainder of the stress scenario horizon and assuming no material capital issuances from March 16 through March 31, 2012. Those results will also be disclosed….”

Read more: 

The story….

Tough call here. The markets enjoy good news and trade higher on bad news. The bears are crying foul over low volume while the bulls say volume does not matter.

As for the VIX…well the last time we were here we took a 15% dump. So what will make this market break ? Hopefully the Teflon coding will stick around for a while.

Full article

Laslow is always cheerful in the face of negativity….love it !

Always funny Bill Maher…

“COLUMBUS – Before getting a prescription for Viagra or other erectile dysfunction drugs, men would have to see a sex therapist, receive a cardiac stress test and get a notarized affidavit signed by a sexual partner affirming impotency, if state Sen. Nina Turner has her way.

The Cleveland Democrat introduced Senate Bill 307 this week.

A critic of efforts to restrict abortion and contraception for women, Turner says she is concerned about men’s reproductive health. Turner’s bill joins a trend of female lawmakers submitting bills regulating men’s health. Turner said if state policymakers want to legislate women’s health choices through measures such as House Bill 125, known as the “Heartbeat bill,” they should also be able to legislate men’s reproductive health. Ohio anti-abortion advocates say the two can’t be compared.

Heartbeat bill sponsor Rep. Lynn Wachtmann, R-Napoleon, said comparing his bill to Turner’s would be like comparing apples to bananas. The Heartbeat bill would prohibit abortion once a heartbeat is detected, as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

“I understand some women think my bill is a personal affront,” Wachtmann said. “Protecting the unborn — to compare this to Viagra is not even related.”

Read more

vía Politico.com

1. “They [OPEC] want to go in and raise the price of oil because we have nobody in Washington that sits back and says you’re not going to raise that f—-ing price, you understand me?” — Donald Trump (April 2011)

2. “I figured out Karl Rove’s political strategy – make gas so expensive, no Democrats can afford to go to the polls.” — Sen. John Kerry (May 2004)

3. “President Obama must announce today in his Nashua address that he is firing Secretary Chu and replacing him with a pro-American-energy appointment. If he doesn’t, then the American people will know the president is still committed to his radical ideology, which wants to artificially raise the cost of energy.” — Newt Gingrich (March, 2012)

4. “You’ve got Donald Trump saying don’t pay OPEC $100 for the oil. Just tell them you’ll give them $50. Really? I go into Trump’s hotel, it’s $1,000 for a suite and I say I’m not going to give you that, I’ll give you $200. I’m on the street looking for another place to sleep. You can’t tell them I’ll give you $50 when the world market is $100. It just doesn’t work that way.” – T. Boone Pickens (Feb. 2012)

5. “We went into a recession in 2008 because of gasoline prices.” – Rick Santorum (Feb. 2012)

6. “I can get you a gallon of gasoline for a dime. … You can buy a gallon of gasoline today for a silver dime. A silver dime is worth $3.50, it’s all about inflation and too many regulations.” – Ron Paul (Sept. 2011)

7. “Since the president has been president, the cost of gasoline has doubled. Not exactly what he might have hoped for. … He’s said it’s not my fault. By the way, we’ve gone from ‘Yes, we can’ to ‘It’s not my fault.’ Well, this is in fact his fault.” – Mitt Romney (March 2012)

8. “Somehow, we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” – Energy Secretary Steven Chu (Sept. 2008)

9. “The next time you hear some politician trotting out some three-point plan for $2 gas, you let them know, we know better. Tell them we’re tired of hearing phony, election year promises that never come about.” — President Barack Obama (March, 2012)

10. Honorary mention: Dan Aykroyd, playing President Jimmy Carter in a Saturday Night Live skit in the 1970s, had some fun with Carter’s famous suggestion that Americans put on sweaters and turn down the heat:
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73891.html#ixzz1ovXMQif3

Another hit for Nokia investors…..

Source

“Analyst Meredith Whitney has been repeatedly lambasted for her prediction on “60 Minutes” in December 2010 that “you could see fifty to a hundred sizable defaults” in municipal bond markets.

In truth, there have been relatively few important municipal defaults—just an average of 5.5 per year in 2010 and 2011 compared to 2.7 per year from 1970 to 2009, according to Moody’s.

However, Fortune’s Duff MacDonald argues today that pointing to the mere number of defaults misses the point of Whitney’s analysis. While she was too specific in her prediction, in general, he finds, she has been proven right.

From his editorial:

The more general point that she was trying to make—that municipal finances in this country were a mess that was only going to get messier—was dead on. Laugh at her all you want, but then try this: go find one person who says their local taxes are falling or their municipal services have improved in the past year or two. I wish you luck in your endeavor.

Munis may not have defaulted in a drastic way over the last year and a quarter, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not under strain, or that they would have been able to survive without the support of state governments that have taken action over this period to prevent Whitney’s prediction from coming true. In particular, MacDonald notes that New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Florida’s Rick Scott, and Indiana’s Mitch Daniels have gone to great lengths to return their municipalities and states overall to fiscal health.

True, this does appear to support the scaled-back assertion Whitney made in early 2011, that municipal defaults would be “social contract” or “employment contract” defaults—changes to trash removal schedules, pensions, road care, etc. But it’s hard to deny that such developments are a reality in many municipalities.

What’s more, MacDonald notes, it is a battle that is still being played out:

Alabama’s Jefferson County has actually gone bankrupt. Stockton, California is all but ready to do the same. And all you have to do is look to Detroit—or any of the nearby auto towns named after a Buick model of one sort or another—and you see fiscal crisis playing out right now. Look in your own backyard—or at the potholes on your neighborhood roads—and you will likely find the same.

Moody’s appears to agree with him. In an announcement released on March 7, the ratings agency wrote:

“Although we have seen large entities like Jefferson County in Alabama seek bankruptcy protection, most bankruptcy filings or defaults in 2011 came from small cities struggling to sustain general government services,” said Anne Van Praagh, Moody’s chief credit officer for public finance. “They include the burdens of non-debt obligations, including pensions, entitlements, and salaries that have grown out of proportion to the resources available to pay for them.”

So Whitney is right—at least in a general sense. Municipalities are and will continue to suffer the ill effects of past spending they could not afford. Whitney’s broader point is more important than her specific prediction, regardless of her attempts to defend it.”

Naughty by nature….

“Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) and Citigroup Inc. (C) may join banks unleashing more than $9 billion in dividend increases and share buybacks if they get passing grades this week on the Federal Reserve’s annual stress test.

Thirteen of the 19 largest U.S. lenders may say they’ll pay out $3.79 billion in extra dividends this year and buy $5.52 billion of additional shares, according to estimates of six analysts compiled by Bloomberg. That’s 30 percent more than they spent last year. San Francisco-based Wells Fargo probably will offer the biggest difference at a combined $4.16 billion, followed by Citigroup with $2.92 billion….”

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