DRUGGED UP AMERICAN KIDS {INFOGRAPHIC}

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Courtesy of the good Dr.

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wHYSzwwVDo&feature=player_embedded#!

PPT members can find full list here

Here are today’s hybrid movers under $1:

Check out this chart from B.I.

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U.S. equities continue to create a flag and tread water around the unchanged line.

Gold is up a bit while other metals and mining companies lead to the downside as a result of comments out of Rio Tinto. Rio Tinto says the ‘golden age’ of China’s building is essentially coming to an end. This has iron ore and other base metals down along with Asian while European markets managed to pare losses.

Market update

3 D heat map

European boards

Go eat a samich and chart out the end of the bull flag in the markets to see when we might have a breakout or breakdown.

Yawn…

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“FORTUNE — On the Friday after the Fourth of July, while the Romney clan was enjoying an extended midsummer break at the family manse on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee and photographers with telephoto lenses were snagging pictures of the candidate in swim trunks, real news was happening, unobserved, 100 miles away.

Nearly two dozen luminaries from the worlds of finance, government, and academe had gathered in secret behind smoked-glass windows in a three-story concrete office building on Commercial Street in Boston’s North End — Romney campaign headquarters — for a meeting of the governor’s recently assembled Economic Policy Steering Group. Some had only to cross the river from Cambridge. Others flew in from Chicago, D.C., and the West Coast. Tough duty in the middle of a holiday weekend, but as one participant says, anonymously, it was “for a good cause.” Each had been requested by e-mail to “exercise discretion in keeping the contents of the discussion and the membership of the group private.” Indeed, no one who was there will confirm for the record that the meeting even took place.”

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“Stronger U.S. economic data have reduced the probability that the Federal Reserve will announce a third round of so-called quantitative easing when policy makers gather next month, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said.

“We do not expect a move to QE3” at the Sept. 12-13 Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Jan Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs in New York, wrote in a note to clients, citing retail sales that rose more than forecast in July.

“While QE3 at the September 12-13 FOMC meeting remains possible, our best estimate is that it will take until late 2012/early 2013 before Fed officials return to balance sheet expansion,” Hatzius wrote.”

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“Warren Buffett’s company has dropped its stake in Intel and added new investments in National Oilwell Varco and Phillips 66.

Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. revealed the moves in a regulatory filing after the market closed Tuesday. The report revealed the new holdings and detailed other shifts in the company’s $74.3 billion stock portfolio.

In the three months ending June 30, Berkshire dropped all of its 7.7 million shares in Intel Corp. It bought 2.8 million shares in National Oilwell Varco Inc. and 27 million shares in Phillips 66.”

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“Billionaire investors George Soros and John Paulson increased their stakes in the biggest exchange- traded fund backed by gold as prices posted the largest quarterly drop since 2008.

Soros Fund Management more than doubled its investment in the SPDR Gold Trust to 884,400 shares as of June 30, compared with three months earlier, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing for second-quarter holdings showed. Paulson & Co. increased its holdings by 26 percent to 21.8 million shares.

Gold slumped 4 percent in the second quarter, the biggest such loss since Sept. 30, 2008. Prices fell as European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke failed to increase stimulus measures, damping the outlook for global growth and demand for the metal as a hedge against inflation. The price is little changed since end-June.”

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“Via The Federal Reserve Bank of New York,

In our recent post on the state and local sector, we argued that structural problems in state and local budgets were exacerbated by the recession and would likely restrain the sector’s growth for years to come. The last couple of years have witnessed threatened or actual defaults in a diversity of places, ranging from Jefferson County, Alabama, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Stockton, California. But do these events point to a wave of future defaults by municipal borrowers? ”

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“The June TIC data is out, in which we find that June was not a good month for non-US Treasury purchases by foreigners. While foreign private and public sources of buying did splurge on US Treasurys in June, purchasing a total of $32.4 billion of US paper, every other category experienced a sell off, with Agencies down $604MM, Corp Equities down $4.3 billion and Corporate bonds down a whopping $22 billion: ”

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“More than a dozen big merchants announced Wednesday their plans to jointly develop a mobile-payments network that will battle similar services from Google Inc.GOOG +0.66% and other companies.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., WMT +0.44% Target Corp., TGT +1.78% 7-Eleven Inc. andSunoco Inc. SUN +0.21% are among the companies hoping to elbow their way into the burgeoning market that turns smartphones into devices for making purchases.”

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“(Reuters) – Government-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are stepping up efforts to find bad home loans that they can force mortgage lenders to buy back from them, providing an increasingly bigger headache to banks.

The government-controlled companies are squabbling with banks over who should bear the burden of losses from the housing crunch, in particular loans made between 2005 and 2008, when the market was at its frothiest.”

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RIMM, AET, CI, CVH, UNH, WLP, DELL, RIMM, MSFT, GDXJ, GDX

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Gapping up

APP +16%, REGI +7.4%, PEIX +6.1%, JDSU +5.8%, NOK +5.6%, NOV +2%,

PSX +1.4%, AET +1.2%, WAG +0.3%, VIP +7.7%,  GALE +5.3%, TGT+1.4%.

Gapping down 

CRMB -12%, NLST -10.5%, CVV -7.3%, KCG -6.4%, PPHM -4.8%, KITD -4.7%,

EFC -4%, MYGN -3.8%, RIO -3.7%, TICC -2.1%, MT -1.9%, STSA -1.8%, BBL -1.6%,

AGNC -0.8%,  CRH -3.4% , VOD -1.2%,

ETR, CACH, DOW, COO, JIVE,

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In Play ,

On the Wires