CHART OF THE DAY: We’re About To Hit A Pivotal Moment In The Housing Recovery

A big moment is coming up in the housing recovery.

According to the latest Case-Shiller report, home prices were only down 0.66% in May, and as you can see they’re very close to being up year-over-year.

Celebrating what would be Friedman’s 100th birthday, a Forbes contributor discusses some of Friedman’s most important contributions, many of which are no longer controversial and have instead become conventional wisdom.

Read the article here.

Companies with women on their boards performed better in challenging markets than those with all-male boards in a study suggesting that mixing genders may temper risky investment moves and increase return on equity.

Read the article here.

This bubble will sink like a mafia stiletto deep into the “heart of the monetary systems” worldwide, proving something Nassim Taleb said about Bernanke when Obama reappointed him in 2009: “He doesn’t even know he doesn’t understand how things work,” that his methods make “homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.”

Read the article here.

Does the latest bounce still have legs to run? Bespoke is out with there survey results showing there are more bears than bulls…

See the article and survey here.

News came out overnight that Twitter has disallowed Instagram users from finding their friends who are already on Twitter and adding them as users on Instagram.

Twitter has confirmed this.

This is big news because it is a first step towards disallowing Instagram users from posting their pictures to Twitter, which almost certainly coming.

Read the rest here.

The $3.7 trillion municipal market is wrapping up its best month since January. If the past decade is any indication, August may be even better.

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The only thing is, it’s not true — not even close. Yet it has been repeated so many times — on PBS and NPR, in the liberal blogosphere, on very-serious Op-Ed pages, in an Oscar-winning documentary — that whenever I give a talk to a group of college students about the financial crisis, the first question predictably is, “Yeah, isn’t it all really about the repeal of Glass-Steagall.”

Read the rest here.

Evidently, God likes Gay Marriage.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The public relations head of fast-food chain Chick-fil-A died suddenly early Friday, according to media reports. Donald Perry, the fast food chain’s vice president of corporate public relations, reportedly died of a heart attack Friday morning. The chain has recently been under fire after President and Chief Operating Officer Dan Cathy publicly came out against same-sex marriage.

Read the rest here.

But this giant hole of fire in the heart of the Karakum Desert is not the aftermath of an attack on Earth, launched from outer space.

It is a crater made by geologists more than 40 years ago, and the flames within have been burning ever since.

Welcome to Derweze in Turkmenistan – or, as the locals have called it, ‘The Door to Hell’.

…with tongue slightly in cheek, here are nine things you won’t be able to do at the Olympic Games this year.

Read the rest here.

Most Americans have a sense TARP was a badly managed program that bailed out “fat cat” bankers at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Well, it’s even worse than you think, according to Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general for TARP (SIGTARP).

Read the rest here.

LONDON — With its hilariously quirky Olympic opening ceremony, a wild jumble of the celebratory and the fanciful; the conventional and the eccentric; and the frankly off-the-wall, Britain presented itself to the world Friday night as something it has often struggled to express even to itself: a nation secure in its own post-empire identity, whatever that actually is.

Read the rest here.

WASHINGTON—Some of the most heavily traded U.S. stocks might also be among the most expensive to trade, costing investors as much as $2.5 billion a year, according to a New York trading and research firm.

Stocks such as Bank of America Corp., Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., and Ford Motor Co. are so popular with high-frequency trading firms that long-term investors often have trouble quickly buying and selling the stocks, according to a report by Pragma Securities LLC.

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Via ZeroHedge:

Of note 2010 GDP was revised from 3.0% to 2.4%, while Q3 2011 GDP was revised from 3.0% to 4.1%, indicating that the slowdown we are experiencing is in fact far worse than previously expected. It also shows that HFT trigger buying or selling on GDP data is completely meaningless as today’s data will be revised violently higher or lower in a year, making it completely irrelevant.

Read the rest and see the graphs here.

ZeroHedge.com shows that stock analysts–including analysts whose firms made handsome fees for participating in Facebook’s May 17th IPO–had recent average price targets of $37.74 for Facebook. This is just below the IPO price. Only one of 38 analysts had a sell recommendation on Facebook.

Read the rest here.

Should you follow the buys and sells of the insiders?

…Zynga insiders took $516 million off the table just before the stock crashed…

In this case, definitely.

Read the article here.

Those wondering why the Department of Justice has refused to go after Jon Corzine for the vaporization of $1.6 billion in MF Global client funds need look no further than the documents uncovered by the Government Accountability Institute that reveal that the now-defunct MF Global was a client of Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer’s former law firm, Covington & Burling.

Read the rest here.

Domestically, they’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you’re doing. So the government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process

Read the rest here.

What the hell is that thing?

Read more here and here.