Down 0.7% at 9,047.89

Skullcandy Delivers Weak Forecast; Shares Skid

Audio brand Skullcandy posted a higher second-quarter profit, helped by growth across all its businesses, but forecast a weak full year.

Shares of Skullcandy, which launched its IPO about a month ago, skidded more than 10 percent in trading after the bell after closing at $16.73 in regular trading.

FULL STORY HERE

Hot Copper….

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Thieves determined to reap value from scrap metal have pried storm grates from streets, sliced catalytic converters from cars and trucks and stripped copper downspouts from churches.Now they’ve sunk to new depths – or reached new heights, depending on your view.Lakeville Police Chief Frank Alvilhiera said police who went to a Verizon cell tower off Route 140 earlier this month found a man attempting to steal copper plates used to ground the towers during lightning strikes.“The officers reported that he was over 100 feet above ground,” said Alvilhiera. “This is the first time we have had a theft from a cell tower that I can recall. This has been the trend with copper prices high. Thefts are on the rise everywhere.”In fact, cell towers have been targeted by copper thieves around the country:In Spartanburg County, S.C., copper has been stolen from seven cell towers this summer, including from four AT&T towers on a single day in July. Police said the rise in thefts may have been prompted by a new law to take effect later this month that will require anyone selling copper to obtain a permit from the county sheriff.In Richland, Penn., two copper grounding plates were discovered missing from a cell tower last week. Each plate costs $500 to replace, according to a technician.

FULL STORY HERE

Off roughly 0.50%

Click Here for Details

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Prepare to be violated in prison, Raj Raj.

FULL STORY HERE

As regular investors fled the unprecedented stock market volatility this month, purchases by company executives relative to sales hit the highest levels since 1998, according to one of the more widely-watched insider buying newsletters on Wall Street.

As regular investors fled the unprecedented stock market volatility this month, purchases by company executives relative to sales hit the highest levels since 1998, according to one of the more widely-watched insider buying newsletters on Wall Street.

FULL STORY HERE

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“In America, the men need printing presses to feel like a man. Me? I’m a simple country boy. Dr. Bernanke ruined my country, but he’ll never touch my bow tie. Care to see my latest interview on CNBC Europe back in my hotel room?”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy may wind up their Tuesday meeting with a list of accomplishments as empty as the streets of Paris in August.

FULL STORY HERE

Editorial penned by Christopher Whalen on Reuters

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“Before I speak, I have something important to say.”
–Groucho Marx

In a clip from a longer interview with WSJ’s Simon Constable, Dr Nouriel Roubini claims Karl Marx was right about capitalism eventually destroying itself. While not quite yet at the breaking point, Roubini observes, we are headed down the road to disaster as predicted by Marx.
Roubini echoes my view that debt reduction and restructuring is the only way to restore real growth to the US and other economies. Breaking up a few zombie banks and cartels probably would not bother him either. But let’s focus on Roubini’s somewhat provocative comment that Marx correctly predicted the present global debt bust and economic deflation.
When I hear people talking about Marxism in reverent tones it makes me nauseous. Marx was not right at all about class being the key determinant of human action. Yet despite America’s pretensions to being a free market, democratic society, the Marxian world view won the battle for ideas in the 20th Century. The New Deal and Great Society efforts to increase the scope of government in America all stem from the socialist ideas of FDR and his political heirs in both parties.
So much of our economic discourse in America today is entirely Marxist in nature — a reference to both Karl and Groucho Marx, as noted above. The legacy of FDR and the two world wars was to kill the American republic and put in its place a cheap imitation of France with platonic regulators pretending to moderate the bad old ways of greedy private business.
The Cold War in particular left Americans more Marxist in their economic thinking than we care to admit. We discarded the focus on individual liberty and the rule of law espoused by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as the drivers of economic activity in a free, democratic society. Instead we have modern day robber barons, faceless corporate managers openly allied with corrupt politicians in Washington and guarded by phalanxes of vicious lawyers.
The fact of our intellectual reliance upon the work of Karl Marx to benchmark our economic success show humans to be creatures of habit, not reason. Marx embarked from a position of dialectical mysticism borrowed from Hegel and then attacked the classical economists, the enlightenment thinkers such as John Staurt Mill and Adam Smith who elevated the role of the individual. Those who laud Marx disparage all things American.
Ludwig von Mises writes in his book Human Action, that Marx stigmatized the economists as “the sycophants of the bourgeoisie.” He notes that Marx was “the son of a well-to-do lawyer,” and Engles, “a wealthy textile manufacturer, never doubted that they themselves were above the law and, notwithstanding their bourgeois background, were endowed with the power to discover absolute truth. It is the task of history to describe the historical conditions which made such a crude doctrine popular.”
Not only was Marxism crude, but it missed most of the major developments of the 20th Century. Revolution occurred not in bourgeois Germany but in brutal, backward Czarist Russia. More important, the class-centric view of Marxism proved incorrect in a world of greater openness, mobility and individual choice. The act of conscious choice driven not by greed, but the desire for betterment; of human action as von Mises coined the term, rejects Marxist class determinism.
But with the world facing global recession or worse, and the children of the New Dealers demanding blood and higher taxes from the greedy capitalists, the question put to Roubini still comes: has the growth possibility of the “capitalist” world, as we inaccurately label the socialist western economies, reached a logical limit as predicted by Marx? I do not believe so.
Nations which adopted Marxist or other types of authoritarian systems have performed abysmally, while nations that focused on individual freedom and openness thrive. The US and EU have lessened their prospects through over-reliance on government and public debt. The answer in both cases is debt reduction and restructuring, and shrinking the size of the public sector.
Since the end of WWI, the nations of the global economy have faced a difficult paradox: the greater openness of trade and finance have created serious economic imbalances, shortfalls in employment and growth in public debt. John Maynard Keynes was no free trader, as we have discussed previously in this blog, precisely because he feared the destabilizing influence of large trade and financial flows.
The fact that advances in technology cause unemployment in older industries has nothing to do with Marxism or any of the political narratives of the 19th or 20th Centuries. Nor does the fact of global over-capacity confirm the Marxist dialectic as to the inevitability of world socialist revolution. What these ills do point out is that the world needs to revisit not tired Marxism, but the Keynesian concept of a competitive currency system and thereby better govern global flows of capital and commerce.
All nations, regardless of supposed economic creed, now face a more basic series of choices: how to balance employment and economic stability with economic openness and the relentless pressure of competition and new technology. The future is not about class warfare as Marx predicted, but is about maximizing the potential and opportunities for every individual.

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Korea’s Kospi Index Rallies 3.8% Following Monday’s Holiday, Nikkei Rises 0.5% (story developing)

SOURCE: CNBC

Starbucks Corp Chief Executive Howard Schultz is winning support for his call to withhold political contributions from U.S. lawmakers until they strike a ”fair, bipartisan” deal on the country’s debt, revenue and spending.Schultz recently led the world’s biggest coffee chain through a painful but successful restructuring that returned it to growth. In his letter Monday, he also challenged fellow U.S. business leaders to do their part by hiring workers to give the national economy a much-needed jolt.

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2011/08/15/starbucks-ceo-urges-halt-to-political-donations/#ixzz1V8wCmLvS

Ruth Madoff is reportedly divorcing her Ponzi-scheming husband after more than five decades of marriage.

British newspaper the Daily Mail, quoting the author of a book about Bernard Madoff, reported that Ruth Madoff wants to end her marriage in an effort to reconcile with her son Andrew.

The couple’s only other son, Mark, committed suicide in December at the age of 46. At the time, friends attributed Mark’s suicide in part to his anguish at being associated with his father’s crimes.

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/08/15/ruth-madoff-reportedly-divorcing-ponzi-scheming-husband/#ixzz1V8vMkwfC

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has added stakes in Dollar General [DG 32.19   0.53  (+1.67%)   ] and Verisk Analytics [VRSK  32.21   -0.01  (-0.03%)   ] as of June 30, compared to its reported holdings on March 31.

The relatively small size of those stakes, Dollar General at $48 million and Verisk at $68 million, however, indicates that Buffett himself did not pull the ‘buy’ trigger.

He has said that his stock moves are usually in the billions of dollars, not millions.

Other changes listed in Berkshire’s just-released 13-F filing with the SEC:

• Berkshire’s MasterCard [MA  335.00   6.93  (+2.11%)   ] stake increased between March 31 and June 30 by 189,000 shares to 405,000 shares.  That’s an increase of 88 percent.  The increased stake is worth $136 million at today’s close, also an indication that it wasn’t a Buffett decision.  (New portfolio manager Todd Combs is my best guess.)
• Berkshire’s massive Wells Fargo [WFC  25.02   0.89  (+3.69%)   ] stake edged 3 percent higher with the addition of 9.7 million shares.  Its 352.3 million share stake is valued at $8.8 billion at today’s close.
• Tonight’s 13-F also reveals a 5 percent decrease in Berkshire’s holdings of Kraft Foods [KFT  34.68   0.28  (+0.81%)   ], bringing that stake down by 5.7 million shares to 99.5 million.  It’s worth $3.4 billion tonight.

SOURCE: CNBC

Billionaire investor John Paulson, whose flagship funds have lost roughly 30 percent this year, cut his position in Bank of America in half in the second quarter.

FULL STORY HERE

Stocks logged their biggest three-day rally since Mar. 2009, fueled by a handful of M&A news and as investors shrugged off some disappointing economic reports. The major indexes wiped out all of last week’s losses following S&P’s downgrade of U.S.’s credit rating.

MAJOR U.S. INDEXES

.DJIA

11482.90

213.88

+1.9%

.NCOMP

2555.20

47.22

+1.88%

0

.SPX

1204.49

25.68

+2.18%

0

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended up nearly 200 points, led by BofA[BAC  7.76   0.57  (+7.93%)   ] and Chevron [CVX  99.10   3.24  (+3.38%)   ].

The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq also closed sharply higher. The CBOE Volatility Index, widely considered the best gauge of fear in the market, tumbled more than 10 percent to trade near 31.

Despite the robust gains in the last three sessions, all three major indexes are still significantly lower for August.

All 10 S&P sectors closed higher, led by utilities, energy and financials.

“Everyone’s sitting on their hands and waiting for the Merkel/Sarkozy meeting tomorrow and they might have their hopes too high [as] they’re hoping something can be worked out,” Art Cashin, director of floor operations at UBS Financial Services told CNBC.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are scheduled to meet on Tuesday, where they are expected to discuss the ongoing euro zone debt crisis.

“What we’re seeing right now is a rebound, but if you go back to the ‘87 crash, we rebounded 6 percent the next day and 10 percent the day after that, but by December, we were headed back for another low,” warned Cashin. “So you want to be very careful.”

Wall Street cheered a flurry of M&A activity. Motorola Mobility [MMI  38.12   13.65  (+55.78%)   ] surged after Google [GOOG  557.23   -6.54  (-1.16%)   ] said it will acquire the wireless phone maker for about $12.5 billion in cash, a move to bolster the Android mobile phone software.

Research In Motion [RIMM  27.11   2.55  (+10.38%)   ] and Nokia [NOK  6.29   0.93  (+17.35%)   ] jumped as both companies emerged as potential winners following the Google/Motorola news. Meanwhile, analysts project the merger will not have a big impact on rival Apple [AAPL  383.41   6.42  (+1.7%)   ].

• Poll: Buy Google on News of Motorola Mobility Deal?

Meanwhile, Bank of America [BAC  7.76   0.57  (+7.93%)   ] gained after the company said it plans to exit the credit card business in Canada and Europe.

Time Warner Cable [TWC  65.02   -0.49  (-0.75%)   ] said it will acquire Carlyle Group’s cable operator Insight Communications for $3 billion in cash, to broaden its presence in the midwest.

And Transocean [RIG 57.26   1.65  (+2.97%)   ]launched a $1.43 billion bid for Norway’s Aker Drilling.

Oil prices climbed, withU.S. light, sweet crudegaining $2.50 to settle at $87.88 a barrel, andLondon Brent crude up $1.88 to settle at $109.91. Oil giants led the market higher, thanks to gains from the likes ofExxonMobil [XOM  74.29   2.29  (+3.18%)   ] andChevron [CVX  99.10   3.24 (+3.38%)   ].

On the earnings front, Lowe’s [LOW  19.68   0.17  (+0.87%)   ] reportedweaker-than-expected sales as homeowners delayed big renovations amid an anemic U.S. economy. At least two brokerages cut their price targets on the firm. Meanwhile, rival Home Depot [HD  31.46   0.88  (+2.88%)   ] is slated to post earnings ahead of the bell Tuesday, in addition to Wal-Mart [WMT 49.98   0.23  (+0.46%)   ].

While the day’s economic news was disappointing, investors seemed to shrug off the bad news. The New York Empire State manufacturing index fell to theirlowest level since Nov. 2010, according to the New York Federal Reserve.

And homebuilder sentiment remained stuck at historic lows in August, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

Despite the disappointing report, homebuilders were up sharply across the board including Lennar [LEN  14.92   0.83  (+5.89%)   ], Beazer [BZH  1.87   0.29 (+18.35%)   ] and Pulte Homes [PHM  4.84   0.32  (+7.08%)   ], all jumped.

More news on the housing market is expected throughout the week with housing starts on Tuesday, weekly mortgage applications on Wednesday and existing home sales on Thursday.

In Europe, the ECB bought 22 billion euros ($31 billion) of government debt last week, reactivating its bond-buy plan to try to halt the spread of the euro zone debt crisis to Spain and Italy.

SOURCE: CNBC

Treasure seekers have trekked into Arizona’s Superstition Mountains in search of a lost gold mine for more than a century. Three years ago, Italian economics professor Alberto Micalizzi, whose hedge fund was on the verge of collapse, looked to the nearby town of Apache Junction to shore up his own fortune.
After his fund lost investors hundreds of millions of dollars in the credit crunch, Micalizzi quietly moved most of its assets into bonds in late 2008.
These were no ordinary bonds.
They were $500 million of highly illiquid paper purportedly issued by a company in a trailer-park suburb of Phoenix, on behalf of a small Australian commodities firm — and backed by the proceeds from $10 billion of diesel from the tiny autonomous Russian republic of Bashkortostan.
The bonds proved to be impossible to sell, and the professor’s Cayman Island-based fund, DD Growth Premium, went into liquidation in the spring of 2009. The fund’s implosion left behind a band of irate investors and an enduring riddle as to what exactly happened.
Reuters has followed a paper trail from the fund’s offices in the upmarket London neighborhood of Kensington to the dusty American southwest, from the fund’s registered home in a Caribbean tax haven to a suburban house in Canberra, Australia.
The story’s cast includes an Arizona businessman on the run from U.S. authorities, a Russian allegedly convicted for fraud, and the Italian at the center of it all: a 42-year-old specialist in options pricing who teaches economics at the respected Bocconi University in Milan.

FULL STORY HERE

Wall St gains for 3rd day on M&A, Europe hopes

Stocks gained for a third day on Monday after last week’s wild swings on U.S. deal news and speculation European leaders may get control of the euro zone’s debt problems.

The market’s somewhat firmer footing follows weeks of volatility and a selloff that put the S&P 500 in negative territory for the year.

The benchmark index is still considered in a correction, having lost 12.6 percent since its April 29 highs due to concerns about U.S. fiscal policy, Europe’s debt woes and the downgrading of the United States’ top-notch credit rating.

Among the day’s biggest gainers, Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc jumped nearly 57 percent to $38.25 on Google Inc’s offer to buy the company for about $12.5 billion in cash. Google dropped 2.6 percent to $549.19.

“You’re seeing kind of a reversal from last week in financials,” said Thomas Villalta, portfolio manager for Jones Villalta Asset Management in Austin, Texas. That “speaks to underlying fundamentals” of the businesses involved.

But the sharp ups and downs of last week could return, he said, as Europe’s concerns weigh.

“Europe has been extraordinarily slow in taking any sort of decisive action to improve perceptions … that means to me we could have volatility through the end of the quarter.”

A meeting on Tuesday by French and German political leaders was expected to result in initiatives needed to restore confidence in credit and other markets.

The S&P financial index rose 2 percent.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up 121.66 points, or 1.08 percent, at 11,390.68. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index was up 15.03 points, or 1.28 percent, at 1,193.84. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 21.28 points, or 0.85 percent, at 2,529.26.

In other takeover news, Time Warner Cable Inc will buy cable operator Insight Communications from Carlyle Group for $3 billion in cash to broaden its presence in the Midwest. Time Warner declined 1.1 percent to $64.78.

(Reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Additional reporting by Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

SOURCE: REUTERS

Stocks Rise on Wall Street Cues; Franc Tumbles

Asian stocks climbed on Monday following modest gains on Wall Street while the franc tumbled against the euro and the dollar as some investors picked up bargains, though overall sentiment remained fragile after a wild week in financial markets.

Stocks in Australia .AXJO and Japan .N225 rose more than 1 percent as main Wall Street .N indices advanced on Friday in light volumes, but without the wild intra-day swings that marked the first few days of trading last week after the U.S. credit rating was downgraded by Standard and Poor’s.

The MSCI index of Asia Pacific stocks outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS rose 0.4 percent after tumbling nearly 4 percent last week.

Traders said the gains look sustainable for now, especially with U.S. stock futures up by 0.8 percent in Asia and after a short-selling ban on financialstocks in Europe last week.

But markets remain vulnerable to declines as debt cutting plans in Europe and the United States threaten to act as a further drag on already weak economic growth.

Early signs that equities might have marked a temporary bottom after last week’s volatile moves and persistent chatter that Swiss authorities may peg the franc against the euro to battle its surge sent the safe-haven currency tumbling by two percent against the euro and the dollar.

The euro, which plumbed a record low around 1.0075 francs last week, climbed to a high of 1.1294 francs in morning trade, up from 1.1079 late in New York on Friday.

But Barclays Capital analysts warned expectations of a peg seemed overdone, believing the franc would rally once again this week if markets started to change their view on its probability.

“We remain CHF bears in the medium run – we agree with the SNB’s view that it is “massively overvalued” – but, this week, we are not expecting the recent appreciation of EUR/CHF to hold,” said Paul Robinson, strategist at Barclays Capital.

The drop in the franc rippled over into gold markets with the precious metal slipping after a 1.5 percent slide in the previous session. Before Friday’s slide, gold had gained 9 percent so far this month.

U.S. crude futures were steady around $85.50 a barrel after settling down slightly on Friday.

Trading activity is expected to be thin with Korea and India out and Japan’s summer “obon” holidays this week.

SOURCE: REUTERS

Asian stocks were off to a steady start to the week on Monday, but the fragile mood of equity markets and lingering concerns about a potential return to recession kept investors cautious.

The FTSE CNBC Asia 100 Index [.FTFCNBCA  6141.23   93.62  (+1.55%)], which measures markets across Asia, gained 0.7 percent.

In Japan, Tokyo stocks climbed after global markets rose last week helped by a short-selling ban on financial stocks in Europe, while Japan’s gross domestic product data in April-June showed a smaller-than-expected contraction.

Shares of Osaka Securities Exchange were untraded with a glut of buy orders at 406,000 yen, 7.4 percent above Friday’s closing price after the Yomiuri newspaper reported on Saturday that the Tokyo Stock Exchange plans to take over the OSE through a tender offer bid.

The Nikkei [.N225  9073.70   109.98  (+1.23%)] gained 1.3 percent to 9,085.18, while the broader Topix advanced 1.2 percent to 777.65.

Australian stocks jumped 1.5 percent, helped by short-covering and solid domestic corporate earnings as investors recovered after a rocky week shaken by worries of a fresh global recession.
Shares in Leighton Holdings, Australia’s top contractor, jumped 4.2 percent after the company stuck to its profit guidance for the 2012 financial year.

The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 index [.AXJO  4253.70   81.10  (+1.94%)] gained 63.3 points to 4,235.9. New Zealand’s benchmark NZX 50 index rose 0.9 percent to 3,244.3.

Shares in Newcrest Mining, the world’s no.3 gold miner, dipped 0.5 percent in line with a retreat in the gold price.

The miner earlier reported a 36 percent rise in full-year underlying profit, thanks to soaring gold prices and its takeover last year of Lihir Gold, in line with market forecasts.

In Southeast Asia, Singapore’s STI [.FTSTI  2866.21   15.62  (+0.55%)] and Malaysia’s KLCI [.KLSE  1487.96   4.29  (+0.29%)] climbed 0.9 and 0.2 percent respectively.

Markets in South Korea are closed for a public holiday.

SOURCE: CNBC