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So absurd.

 

The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.

It was a mild spring day, April 2012, and our small group, including a few of his friends and family, was shielded from the sun by the patchwork shadows of maple trees. But the Shooter was sweating as he talked about his uncertain future, his plans to leave the Navy and SEAL Team 6.

He stood up several times with an apologetic gripe about the heat, leaving a perspiration stain on the seat-back cushion. He paced. I didn’t know him well enough then to tell whether a glass of his favorite single malt, Lagavulin, was making him less or more edgy.

We would end up intimately familiar with each other’s lives. We’d have dinners, lots of Scotch. He’s played with my kids and my dogs and been a hilarious, engaging gentleman around my wife.

In my yard, the Shooter told his story about joining the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. To escape, he almost by accident found himself in a Navy recruiter’s office. “He asked me what I was going to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be a sniper.

“He said, ‘Hey, we have snipers.’

“I said, ‘Seriously, dude. You do not have snipers in the Navy.’ But he brought me into his office and it was a pretty sweet deal. I signed up on a whim.”

“That’s the reason Al Qaeda has been decimated,” he joked, “because she broke my fucking heart.”

I would come to know about the Shooter’s hundreds of combat missions, his twelve long-term SEAL-team deployments, his thirty-plus kills of enemy combatants, often eyeball to eyeball. And we would talk for hours about the mission to get bin Laden and about how, over the celebrated corpse in front of them on a tarp in a hangar in Jalalabad, he had given the magazine from his rifle with all but three lethally spent bullets left in it to the female CIA analyst whose dogged intel work and intuition led the fighters into that night.

When I was first around him, as he talked I would always try to imagine the Shooter geared up and a foot away from bin Laden, whose life ended in the next moment with three shots to the center of his forehead. But my mind insisted on rendering the picture like a bad Photoshop job — Mao’s head superimposed on the Yangtze, or tourists taking photos with cardboard presidents outside the White House.

Bin Laden was, after all, the man CIA director Leon Panetta called “the most infamous terrorist in our time,” who devoured inordinate amounts of our collective cultural imagery for more than a decade. The number-one celebrity of evil. And the man in my backyard blew his lights out.

ST6 in particular is an enterprise requiring extraordinary teamwork, combined with more kinds of support in the field than any other unit in the history of the U.S. military.

Similarly, NASA marshaled thousands of people to put a man on the moon, and history records that Neil Armstrong first set his foot there, not the equally talented Buzz Aldrin.

Enough people connected to the SEALs and the bin Laden mission have confirmed for me that the Shooter was the “number two” behind the raid’s point man going up the stairs to bin Laden’s third-floor residence, and that he is the one who rolled through the bedroom door solo and confronted the surprisingly tall terrorist pushing his youngest wife, Amal, in front of him through the pitch-black room. The Shooter had to raise his gun higher than he expected.

The point man is the only one besides the Shooter who could verify the kill shots firsthand, and he did just that to another SEAL I spoke with. But even the point man was not in the room then, having tackled two women into the hallway, a crucial and heroic decision given that everyone living in the house was presumed to be wearing a suicide vest.

But a series of confidential conversations, detailed descriptions of mission debriefs, and other evidence make it clear: The Shooter’s is the most definitive account of those crucial few seconds, and his account, corroborated by multiple sources, establishes him as the last man to see Osama bin Laden alive. Not in dispute is the fact that others have claimed that they shot bin Laden when he was already dead, and a number of team members apparently did just that.

What is much harder to understand is that a man with hundreds of successful war missions, one of the most decorated combat veterans of our age, who capped his career by terminating bin Laden, has no landing pad in civilian life.

Back in April, he and some of his SEAL Team 6 colleagues had formed the skeleton of a company to help them transition out of the service. In my yard, he showed everyone his business-card mock-ups. There was only a subtle inside joke reference to their team in the company name.

Unlike former SEAL Team 6 member Matt Bissonnette (No Easy Day), they do not rush to write books or step forward publicly, because that violates the code of the “quiet professional.” Someone suggested they might sell customized sunglasses and other accessories special operators often invent and use in the field. It strains credulity that for a commando team leader who never got a single one of his men hurt on a mission, sunglasses would be his best option. And it’s a simple truth that those who have been most exposed to harrowing danger for the longest time during our recent unending wars now find themselves adrift in civilian life, trying desperately to adjust, often scrambling just to make ends meet.

At the time, the Shooter’s uncle had reached out to an executive at Electronic Arts, hoping that the company might need help with video-game scenarios once the Shooter retired. But the uncle cannot mention his nephew’s distinguishing feature as the one who put down bin Laden.

Secrecy is a thick blanket over our Special Forces that inelegantly covers them, technically forever. The twenty-three SEALs who flew into Pakistan that night were directed by their command the day they got back stateside about acting and speaking as though it had never happened.

“Right now we are pretty stacked with consultants,” the video-game man responded. “Thirty active and recently retired guys” for one game: Medal of Honor Warfighter. In fact, seven active-duty Team 6 SEALs would later be punished for advising EA while still in the Navy and supposedly revealing classified information. (One retired SEAL, a participant in the bin Laden raid, was also involved.)

With the focus and precision he’s learned, the Shooter waits and watches for the right way to exit, and adapt. Despite his foggy future, his past is deeply impressive. This is a man who is very pleased about his record of service to his country and has earned the respect of his peers.

“He’s taken monumental risks,” says the Shooter’s dad, struggling to contain the frustration that roughs the edges of his deep pride in his son. “But he’s unable to reap any reward.”

It’s not that there isn’t one. The U.S. government put a $25 million bounty on bin Laden that no one is likely to collect. Certainly not the SEALs who went on the mission nor the support and intelligence experts who helped make it all possible. Technology is the key to success in this case more than people, Washington officials have said.

The Shooter doesn’t care about that. “I’m not religious, but I always felt I was put on the earth to do something specific. After that mission, I knew what it was.”

Others also knew, from the commander-in-chief on down. The bin Laden shooting was a staple of presidential-campaign brags. One big-budget movie, several books, and a whole drawerful of documentaries and TV films have fortified the brave images of the Shooter and his ST6 Red Squadron members.

There is commerce attached to the mission, and people are capitalizing. Just not the triggerman. While others collect, he is cautious and careful not to dishonor anyone. His manners come at his own expense.

“No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job,” Barack Obama said last Veterans’ Day, “or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home.”

But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:

Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.

Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon’s butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.

Then there is the “bolt” bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.

“Personally,” his wife told me recently, “I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago,” when her husband joined ST6.

When the White House identified SEAL Team 6 as those responsible, camera crews swarmed into their Virginia Beach neighborhood, taking shots of the SEALs’ homes.

After bin Laden’s face appeared on their TV in the days after the killing, the Shooter cautioned his older child not to mention the Al Qaeda leader’s name ever again “to anybody. It’s a bad name, a curse name.” His kid started referring to him instead as “Poopyface.” It’s a story he told affectionately on that April afternoon visit to my home.

He loves his kids and tears up only when he talks about saying goodbye to them before each and every deployment. “It’s so much easier when they’re asleep,” he says, “and I can just kiss them, wondering if this is the last time.” He’s thrilled to show video of his oldest in kick-boxing class. And he calls his wife “the perfect mother.”

In fact, the couple is officially separated, a common occurrence in ST6. SEAL marriages can be perilous. Husbands and fathers have been mostly away from their families since 9/11. But the Shooter and his wife continue to share a house on very friendly, even loving terms, largely to save money.

“We’re actually looking into changing my name,” the wife says. “Changing the kids’ names, taking my husband’s name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other.”

When the family asked about any kind of government protection should the Shooter’s name come out, they were advised that they could go into a witness-protection-like program.

Just as soon as the Department of Defense creates one.

“They [SEAL command] told me they could get me a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee” under an assumed identity. Like Mafia snitches, they would not be able to contact their families or friends. “We’d lose everything.”

“These guys have millions of dollars’ worth of knowledge and training in their heads,” says one of the group at my house, a former SEAL and mentor to the Shooter and others looking to make the transition out of what’s officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group. “All sorts of executive function skills. That shouldn’t go to waste.”

The mentor himself took a familiar route — through Blackwater, then to the CIA, in both organizations as a paramilitary operator in Afghanistan.

Private security still seems like the smoothest job path, though many of these guys, including the Shooter, do not want to carry a gun ever again for professional use. The deaths of two contractors in Benghazi, both former SEALs the mentor knew, remind him that the battlefield risks do not go away.

By the time the Shooter visited me that first time in April, I had come to know more of the human face of what’s called Tier One Special Operations, in addition to the extraordinary skill and icy resolve. It is a privileged, consuming, and concerning look inside one of the most insular clubs on earth.

And I understood that he would face a world very different from the supportive one President Obama described at Arlington National Cemetery a few months before.

As I watched the Shooter navigate obstacles very different from the ones he faced so expertly in four war zones around the globe, I wondered: Is this how America treats its heroes? The ones President Obama called “the best of the best”? The ones Vice-President Biden called “the finest warriors in the history of the world”?

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Symbol	Company Name	Last	Change	Change %	Volume
VWO	Vanguard FTSE Emerging …	44.28	+0.01	+0.02%	770,717
XLI	Select Sector SPDR-Ind …	40.64	+0.06	+0.15%	618,700
DENN	Denny’s Corp.	5.37	+0.01	+0.09%	600,000
SPY	SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust	151.78	+0.01	+0.01%	557,561
FE	FirstEnergy Corp.	40.05	-0.20	-0.50%	523,072
TTWO	Take-Two Interactive S …	15.13	UNCH	UNCH	514,400
WFR	MEMC Electronic Materi …	4.49	UNCH	UNCH	500,400
SQNM	Sequenom Inc.	4.70	+0.01	+0.21%	424,300
ATVI	Activision Blizzard Inc.	13.59	+0.02	+0.18%	395,200
XLF	Select Sector SPDR-Fin …	17.69	+0.01	+0.06%	357,650
CPN	Calpine Corp.	19.99	+0.02	+0.10%	323,330
LCC	US Airways Group Inc.	14.40	-0.06	-0.41%	319,000
HSP	Hospira Inc.	35.32	UNCH	UNCH	294,748
EEMV	iShares MSCI Emerging …	61.03	+0.05	+0.08%	274,604
GE	General Electric Co.	22.45	UNCH	UNCH	182,237
NUAN	Nuance Communications …	19.55	+0.03	+0.15%	178,997
GLD	SPDR Gold Trust	159.69	-0.01	-0.01%	166,690
IWM	iShares Russell 2000 I …	90.71	+0.01	+0.01%	162,312
BAC	Bank of America Corp.	11.86	UNCH	UNCH	152,104
MRK	Merck & Co. Inc.	41.38	UNCH	UNCH	131,917
TSM	Taiwan Semiconductor M …	18.51	+0.03	+0.17%	118,168
QQQ	PowerShares QQQ Trust …	68.01	UNCH	UNCH	117,899
EEM	iShares Inc. MSCI Emer …	43.88	+0.05	+0.11%	116,024
KMB	Kimberly-Clark Corp.	90.53	+0.13	+0.14%	111,258
NOV	National Oilwell Varco …	68.26	UNCH	UNCH	110,411

More stock for junkies

 

Symbol	Company		Last Sale*	Change Net / %	Share Volume
FB	Facebook, Inc.		$ 27.82	0.44  1.56%	751,539
GILD	Gilead Sciences, Inc.		$ 40.41	0.01  0.02%	735,217
TTWO	Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc.		$ 15.10	0.03  0.20%	539,400
ATVI	Activision Blizzard, Inc		$ 13.3934	0.1766  1.30%	452,520
SQNM	Sequenom, Inc.		$ 4.6942	0.0042  0.09%	434,437
QQQ	PowerShares QQQ Trust, Series 1		$ 67.98	0.03  0.04%	217,977
DELL	Dell Inc.		$ 13.63	0.07  0.51%	215,391
NUAN	Nuance Communications, Inc.		$ 19.53	0.01  0.05%	187,487
INTC	Intel Corporation		$ 21	0.03  0.14%	172,248
LULU	lululemon athletica inc.		$ 67.3499	0.0001  0.00%	119,689

From NASDAQ

Below were today’s most active

Symbol	Company		Last Sale*	Change Net / %	Share Volume
BAC	Bank of America Corporation		$ 11.86	unch	2,948,227
UAL	United Continental Holdings, Inc.		$ 26.23	0.28  1.06%	570,000
FE	FirstEnergy Corporation		$ 40.2499	0.0001  0.00%	526,718
WFR	MEMC Electronic Materials, Inc.		$ 4.4744	0.0056  0.13%	506,900
TLM	Talisman Energy Inc.		$ 12.33	unch	465,017
KORS	Michael Kors Holdings Limited		$ 56.92	0.08  0.14%	436,526
RDN	Radian Group Inc.		$ 6.605	0.095  1.46%	362,800
HSP	Hospira Inc		$ 35.2626	0.0574  0.16%	336,833
LCC	US Airways Group, Inc. New		$ 14.48	0.02  0.14%	326,400
CPN	Calpine Corporation		$ 19.9948	0.0248  0.12%	323,830

 

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Not much happened today. The biggest story of the day was Eric Schmidt is selling a huge stake in $GOOG.

DOW  down 21

NASDAQ down 1.8

S&P down 0.98

Gold down $15

WTI up $1.28

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KkUeRPjc-Y 450 300]

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Once in a while i have to smack my self for falling into a false sense of security. This post is one of those external  reminders to help me not forget.

So we had a balance sheet recession and in response the fed and the taxpayer bailed out the system.

The cause of this balance sheet recession was due to an enormous amount of on and off balance sheet liability tied to the housing market.

Now, that we have forgotten about off balance sheet talk it is business as usual for the crooks.

Nobody went to jail, the banks get a free ride off of the taxpayers back, and the only ones who benefit from this environment are large corporations and the banking system.

The large corporations have refinanced mostly all outstanding debt down to historically low rates while the banks get to use the free money to speculate.

This speculation has some effect upon CPI. It is inflationary no matter how statistics are jiggered.

Now in a truly capitalistic society the banks would have gone bankrupt. But the bankruptcies would have been so wide spread that there would be no financial system left. We had to act plain and simple.

We in effect nationalized the banks without having any of the transparency or controls that would have come from nationalization.

The question remains; why are we still keeping a ZIRP policy going? Why would we take such high risks?

There is only one answer. The black hole that caused the crash is largely still present.

There is no other answer. If it were not there then the banks would lend money to the private sector at a rate similar too or better than it was before the crash of the system.

While this seems plainly obvious, the boob tube is doing a good job of moving the American people further away from worry over the entire topic.

Here is a great video on balance sheets and gimmickry;(8 minutes for ADD readers.)

Notional value on SWAPS is something to be concerned over. Not having disclosure or transparency is something to be concerned over. Not insisting upon said disclosure and regulation thereof will cause another melt down in the system.

The question is when will the glass menagerie fall again?

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmNV8_VBGX0 450 300]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“We’re more fooled by noise than ever before, and it’s because of a nasty phenomenon called “big data.” With big data, researchers have brought cherry-picking to an industrial level.

Modernity provides too many variables, but too little data per variable. So the spurious relationships grow much, much faster than real information.

In other words: Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.

Just like bankers who own a free option — where they make the profits and transfer losses to others – researchers have the ability to pick whatever statistics confirm their beliefs (or show good results) … and then ditch the rest.

Big-data researchers have the option to stop doing their research once they have the right result. In options language: The researcher gets the “upside” and truth gets the “downside.” It makes him antifragile, that is, capable of benefiting from complexity and uncertainty — and at the expense of others.

But beyond that, big data means anyone can find fake statistical relationships, since the spurious rises to the surface. This is because in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to variance (or noise) than to information (or signal). It’s a property of sampling: In real life there is no cherry-picking, but on the researcher’s computer, there is. Large deviations are likely to be bogus.

We used to have protections in place for this kind of thing, but big data makes spurious claims even more tempting. And fewer and fewer papers today have results that replicate: Not only is it hard to get funding for repeat studies, but this kind of research doesn’t make anyone a hero. Despite claims to advance knowledge, you can hardly trust statistically oriented sciences or empirical studies these days.

This is not all bad news though: If such studies cannot be used to confirm, they can be effectively used to debunk — to tell us what’s wrong with a theory, not whether a theory is right.

Another issue with big data is the distinction between real life and libraries. Because of excess data as compared to real signals, someone looking at history from the vantage point of a library will necessarily find many more spurious relationships than one who sees matters in the making; he will be duped by more epiphenomena. Even experiments can be marred with bias, especially when researchers hide failed attempts or formulate a hypothesis after the results — thus fitting the hypothesis to the experiment (though the bias is smaller there).

This is the tragedy of big data: The more variables, the more correlations that can show significance. Falsity also grows faster than information; it is nonlinear (convex) with respect to data (this convexity in fact resembles that of a financial option payoff). Noise is antifragile. Source: N.N. Taleb

The problem with big data, in fact, is not unlike the problem with observational studies in medical research. In observational studies, statistical relationships are examined on the researcher’s computer. In double-blind cohort experiments, however, information is extracted in a way that mimics real life. The former produces all manner of results that tend to be spurious (as last computed by John Ioannidis) more than eight times out of 10….”

Full article

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“Humphrey Neill, the father of contrarian analysis, famously wrote that “when everyone thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong.”

That’s a sobering thought when it comes to gold, since the belief in gold’s investment virtues seems to be almost universal.

For this column I am taking Neill’s advice to heart, with help from a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. “The Golden Dilemma,” by Claude Erb, a former commodities portfolio manager for Trust Company of the West, and Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University, calls the conventional wisdom into question.

I should stress that the study’s authors are not predisposed against gold. For example, Erb told me, he frequently bought and held gold for the commodities portfolio he used to manage. Here’s a summary of the study’s findings:

Gold as inflation hedge

This is perhaps the most widely held belief about gold, and the one that the study’s authors devote the most energy to analyzing. They found that gold does not live up to the widely held belief that gold’s price in real terms remains more or less constant.

Over any of the time periods assumed by investors — from the short term to as long as 20 years — gold’s real price has fluctuated wildly. Interestingly, Erb and Prof. Harvey told me in separate interviews that this finding holds regardless of how inflation is defined — whether it’s based on government data, or the shadow statistics some think are more accurate, or monetary inflation as measured by money supply….”

Full article

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U.S. equities pare a minor sell off while gold and silver tank. The dollar stays strong and oil flags.

Europe turned a green session into a red close.

All in all a boring session thus far.

Market update 

You are dead….for the moment.

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

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I’m sure a government panel study did not need to waste your tax dollars to tell you this, but maybe since it is official Uncle Sam will change its ways across the board….

Full article

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“$GS has lowered its rating on equities in general, although this is really just over the near term rather than in the long term. The near-term rating has been cut to Neutral from Overweight for a three-month outlook. Goldman Sachs said that the recent gains in equities need time to be digested by the markets, as the chances for a strong rally to continue have lowered on the heels of such large gains since the end of 2012.

Goldman Sachs is maintaining strong conviction on the long-term outlook, and again this downgrade is based on the near term. Asset prices have appreciated to the point that they are fully priced, based on the firm’s near-term expectations and price targets.

For a 12-month outlook, the firm maintains an Overweight stance…..”

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“The negative fourth-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) reading of -0.1% caught most Wall St. analysts and economists by surprise. This unforeseen number was skewed by a huge decrease in government spending. Most now expect the number to be revised to a positive reading, and the first quarter to show 1% to 2% growth. This slow growth scenario is just the right playing field for Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) secular growth stock picks.

In the past, when U.S. GDP growth was between 0% and 2%, the secular universe outperformed the rest of the Russell 2000 by 3.2% over the subsequent six months and by 7.2% over the next 12 months. The Bank of America/Merrill Lynch team screened the Russell 2000 and the Russell Midcap looking for stocks that met their secular growth definition. These are names with lower-than-average variability of earnings, and they are expected to deliver 10% to 20% earningsgrowth over the next three to five years.

We looked for the top four stocks in their small and midcap secular growth universe with the highest earnings growth rates. In the mid cap stocks, the top four stocks Bank of America has a Buy rating on are….”

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“One of the general rules of the stock market is that things will get as good (or bad) as they can get, then prices will start moving in the other direction. This is another way of describing “regression to the mean”.

This is the reason that we technicians have our indicators — so that we can get an idea when conditions have reached extremes that could cause prices to start moving in the opposite direction. One of the indicators I like is the Percent of PMOs (Price Momentum Oscillators) Above Zero because it is smoother and has less noise than other intermediate-term indicators.

The second panel on the chart below shows the PMO for the S&P 500 Index, which is the price index just above it. The bottom panel shows the percentage of individual S&P 500 stocks that have PMOs above the zero line.

As you can see, the indicator has recently topped at a very overbought level……”

Full article and chart

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“(MoneyWatch) Even as the volume of spam in our inboxes appears to be receding, other threats are looming. According to cyber-security company Kaspersky, for example, about 200,000 new malware samples are appearing in the wild every day. And last year, a staggering 91 percent of businesses experienced some sort of IT security event.

Perhaps the most frightening statistics are related to the rise of botnets. Stuxnet — the first known state-engineered cyber-weapon — was uncovered in 2010, and since then about a half-dozen more have been found. Gartner’s Research Director, Lawrence Orans, contends that as many as 5 percent of corporate PCs and 30 percent of home computers are already infected 

Most of us — at home nor at work — have the resources of an enterprise class IT department to protect our computers and data. So is there any hope for protection? Indeed, there is. As I recently explained in a blog post for eHow Tech, you can mitigate a vast amount of your risk by following five simple and inexpensive security rules….”

Full article

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“FORTUNE — Bank chief executives have spent the past few months telling investors not to worry about rising interest rates. Most have said their banks are not taking risks in the bond market and are protected from losses.

One Federal Reserve governor doesn’t agree. On Thursday, governor Jeremy Stein became the latest high profile person to publicly worry about what a bond bubble could do to the financial sector and the economy. In a speech at a symposium in St. Louis, Stein talked about how or if the Fed should respond.

Stein sees some areas of concern. He thinks the high-yield bond market might be due for a pull back, and that some mortgage finance companies could be overstretched. But Stein says at least for now a drop in bond prices won’t do too much harm to the overall economy.

One exception: Banks. Stein says historically banks have tended to put their money in longer-term bonds, which have higher yields, when interest rates are low. And he sees some of that behavior today. The problem is longer-term bonds tend to lose the most when interest rates rise.

Determining how much of a hit banks could take from a drop in bond prices isn’t easy. Banks aren’t required to disclose their bonds holdings. Most give clues, but not in any consistent way. What’s more, higher interest rates would boost banks’ lending profits, offsetting some of the losses in their bond portfolios.

Still, it appears, at least initially, banks stand to lose more from higher rates than they will gain. According to FDIC data, banks earned on average just 3.86% on all their loans and leases. That was the lowest that figure has been since the FDIC began collecting the data back in 1984, but given that 10-year Treasury bonds are yielding around 2%, still high enough to substantiate Stein’s claim that banks are “reaching for yield.”

Last summer, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, in an effort to reassure Congress about the safety of his bank’s investments in the wake of the London Whale trading loss, testified that the average duration of the the bonds in JPMorgan’s portfolio was three years. Look at JPMorgan’s books, however, and you might come away with a very different number….”

Full article

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“The sun is set to shine brighter for some solar investors, according to a new Citigroup report.

Citigroup expects a surge in demand for solar energy, MarketWatch reports, noting that the brokerage firm sees a number of seemingly positive fundamentals for the industry.

For example, over the past five years, installations grew at a compounded annualized rate of 59 percent, according to MarketWatch. Then too, there is the political drive for cleaner energy and the rising costs of fuel.

“Key point, many of the U.S. utilities we have surveyed over the past several weeks have highlighted the need to diversify into other generation sources — it is well understood that gas prices won’t stay depressed forever,” the reports states.

Yet, the positive fundamentals do not appear to be priced into the shares of solar companies.

And perhaps rightfully so in the case of some companies, according to Citigroup analyst Shahriar Pourreza, author of the report.

Playing the solar market at this point is about looking at which segment of the business has the sunniest outlook.

As Forbes points out, Pourreza initiated coverage of seven companies, but stamped buy ratings on only four of them…..”

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“The global currency war could get even worse if Europe joins the fray, says the man widely credited with coining the term.

Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega told Reuters European countries should focus on reviving their economies with more investments, rather than trying to weaken the euro to protects jobs as France has suggested ahead of next week’s meeting of G-20 economic powers.

“We will continue to have this currency problem unless the global economy takes off,” Mantega said in an interview. “The solution here is to make their economies more dynamic and jolt them out of stagnation.”

More than two years ago Mantega used the term “currency wars” to describe the series of competitive devaluations adopted by rich nations to bolster their exports amid the global slowdown to the detriment of emerging market nations.

Since then Brazil has actively sought to depreciate its currency, the real, to protect local manufacturers of everything from shoes to suits and make its exports more competitive. It has taken bold action to curb speculative capital inflows with higher taxes.

Mantega said that approach was not right for everyone — especially for heavily industrialized nations….”

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“When Vladimir Putin says the U.S. is endangering the global economy by abusing its dollar monopoly, he’s not just talking. He’s betting on it.

Not only has Putin made Russia the world’s largest oil producer, he’s also made it the biggest gold buyer. His central bank has added 570 metric tons of the metal in the past decade, a quarter more than runner-up China, according to IMF data compiled by Bloomberg. The added gold is also almost triple the weight of the Statue of Liberty.

“The more gold a country has, the more sovereignty it will have if there’s a cataclysm with the dollar, the euro, the pound or any other reserve currency,” Evgeny Fedorov, a lawmaker for Putin’s United Russia party in the lower house of parliament, said in a telephone interview in Moscow….”

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“While hardly presented by the mainstream media with the same panache dedicated to the monthly ARIMA-X-12 seasonally-adjusted, climate-affected, goal-seek devised non-farm payroll data, the three month delayed Foodstamp number is according to many a far greater attestation to the “effectiveness” of the Obama administration to turn the economy around. And far greater it is: since his inauguration, the US has generated just 841,000 jobs through November 2012, a number is more than dwarfed by the 17.3 million new foodstamps and disability recipients added to the rolls in the past 4 years. And since the start of the depression in December 2007, America has seen those on foodstamps and disability increase by 21.8 million, while losing 3.6 million jobs. End result: total number of foodstamp recipients as of November: 47.7 million, an increase of 141,000 from the prior month, and reversing the brief downturn in October, while total US households on foodstamps just hit an all time record of 23,017,768, an increase of 73,952 from the prior month. The cost to the government to keep these 23 million households content and not rising up? $281.21 per month per household.

Total Americans on foodstamps…”

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“In February, 2009, I wrote for theWall Street Journal an article entitled Reaganomics versus Obamanomics. The article explained that the emerging Obamanomics was pursuing exactly the opposite of every policy of the enormously successful Reaganomics, and predicted that it would produce exactly the opposite results.

Well, the results are in, and under President Obama the American people have now suffered the worst 5 years since the Great Depression, as first explained by Steve McCann of the American Thinker on January 25. McCann writes….”

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“The 55th annual Grammys are over, and unlike last year, a wide range of artists is heading home with hardware.

Adele stole the show in 2012, winning all six awards for which she was nominated. In 2013, Dan Auerbach and the Black Keys were the biggest winners, taking home four trophies. Skrillex claimed three, as did Gotye, Jay-Z and Kayne West.

Mumford & Sons won just two Grammys, but scored the biggest one of the night: Best Album forBabel. The group’s latest effort was also a major commercial success, moving 1.4 million copies in 2012, which made it the No. 4 best-selling album of the year….”

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