The following script is from “The Spymaster Speaks” which aired on March 11, 2012. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Shachar Bar-On, producer.

When President Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this past week, the subject was how, when and if to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Netanyahu saying Israel can’t afford to wait much longer; Mr. Obama arguing there’s still time to let sanctions and diplomacy do the job. And he said some top intelligence officials in Israel side with him.

Actually, you’ll hear from one of them tonight: Meir Dagan, former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s equivalent of the CIA. It’s unheard of for someone who held such a high-classified position to speak out publicly, but he told us he felt compelled to talk, because he is so opposed to a preemptive Israeli strike against Iran anytime soon.

Dagan headed the Mossad for nearly a decade until last year. His primary, if not his only mission was to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. And he says there is time to wait, perhaps as long as three years.

Lesley Stahl: You have said publicly that bombing Iran now is the stupidest idea you’ve ever heard. That’s a direct quote.

Dagan: An attack on Iran before you are exploring all other approaches is not the right way how to do it.

Read the rest here.

General Electric will keep its focus on boosting its dividend and improving margins as it faces what Chief Executive Jeff Immelt expects to be an extended period of economic instability.

“We live in what most business commentators call a volatile world. I would argue that when the environment is continuously unstable, it is no longer volatile. Rather, we have entered a new economic era,” the head of the largest U.S. conglomerate said in his annual letter to shareholders. “It could remain this way for a long time.”

Over the past year shocks including Europe’s debt crisis and Japan’s nuclear disaster, as well as the uneven U.S. economic recovery, have hit both investor confidence and GE’s operations.

In the face of that uncertainty, the world’s largest maker of jet engines and electric turbines aims to cut its costs — and to reverse a trend of outsourcing manufacturing operations in order to run its factories more efficiently.

FOCUS ON DIVIDEND

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No fracking way…..

RSD.A, AMX, VOD, TEVA, SDIV, FDD

Zig when they zag…

“Stocks are undervalued, and investors are coming back in to buy, despite the recent plunge in the Dow, says Goldman Sachs strategist Abby Joseph Cohen.

The Dow Industrials Index touched 13,000 for the first time since May 2008 then promptly plunged several hundred points before recovering ground.

Nevertheless, Cohen figures the S&P 500 at its current level has priced in a 7 percent decline in corporate profits in the coming five years, she told CNBC

“That’s possible but it’s not likely,” Cohen said, “but it gives you a sense of how nervous investors have been, and the sort of opportunities in equities if, in fact, the recession is over and profit growth continues.”

Jobs numbers seem to suggest that the sluggish, but steady, recovery will continue. Official numbers are due tomorrow, but the private ADP report says that employers added 216,000 jobs in February, in line with expectations.

A separate Associated Press poll of economists predicts that the government figure will show 210,000 jobs added, but that the unemployment rate will stay at 8.3 percent. They added that the rate would likely fall to 8 percent by Election Day and to 7.4 percent by the end of 2013.

Meanwhile, employers are laying off fewer workers, down 3.3 percent in February from the month before according to consultant Challenger, Gray & Christmas, and reports are surfacing that manufacturers are struggling to find talent, even paying signing bonuses, a huge shift in the market.

A more downbeat assessment comes from Trim Tabs Investment Research. Its figures are based on daily income tax deposits by salaried employees in the United States.

Their call: The U.S. economy added 149,000 jobs in February, down from a January estimate of 181,000.

“To bring down the unemployment rate, the economy needs to generate at least 250,000 new jobs every month,” says Madeline Schnapp, director of macroeconomic research at TrimTabs. “Job growth of 149,000 new jobs is not terrible, but it is also not a result worth celebrating either.”

Source 

Forbes believes the fed is hurting housing….

RIP Mark.

The Mark Haines Bottom

Gapping up

CO%, DEXO +8.2%, ZNGA +1%,  SBUX +3.6%, O +5.9%, MCP +3.9%, SBUX +3.6%, SWHC +1.9%, RENN +8.4%, COO +5.9%, HMIN +5.4%, CAAS +4.1%,

NVAX +3.8% , ULTA +0.8%,  AZN +1.2%, NVS +0.8%,

Gapping down

GMCR -16%, GBG -8.4%, BODY -7.7%, GNOM -6%, ARO -3.4%, ARR -3%, FSIN -2.3%, TXN -1%,  FGP -1.4%, GNOM -1%, ING -2.4%, STD -1.8%,

DB -1.3%, CS -1.2%, BCS -0.9%, BP -1.4%, TOT -0.9%, ROYL -0.8%, OXY -0.7%, SNN -1.8% , PLL -1.6%,  E -0.7%,  ACI -1%,

Source

Body Central Corp. (BODY) : The women’s clothing retailer forecast 2012 revenue of $348 million at most, falling short of the average analyst estimate of $355 million in a Bloomberg survey.

Cooper Companies Inc. (COO) : The maker of contact lenses reported first-quarter earnings of $1.12 a share, beating the average analyst estimate of $1.04.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. (GMCR) plunged 16 percent to $52.62. Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) said it plans to start selling a single-cup coffee system in a bid to expand beyond its partnership with the Waterbury, Vermont-based specialty coffee and coffee maker company. Starbucks increased 3.4 percent to $52.10.

Heckmann Corp. (HEK) : The provider of water treatment and disposal services reported fourth-quarter revenue of $51.7 million, missing the average analyst estimate of $54.5 million. The company also said it will acquire Thermo Fluids Inc. for $245 million in cash and stock.

Molycorp Inc. (MCP) rose 3.9 percent to $27. The owner of the largest rare-earth deposit outside of China agreed to buy Canada’s Neo Material Technologies Inc. (NEM CN) for about C$1.3 billion ($1.3 billion) to increase Chinese sales and gain technology used to make magnets.

PowerSecure International Inc. (POWR) : The provider of lighting and electrical systems reported fourth-quarter revenue of $39.7 million, beating the average analyst estimate of $35.5 million.

Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. (SWHC) increased 8.7 percent to $6.15. The handgun manufacturer reported third- quarter earnings excluding some items of 8 cents a share, beating the average analyst estimate of 4 cents.

Texas Instrument Inc. (TXN) : The world’s largest maker of analog semiconductors reduced its first-quarter sales and profit forecasts, citing lower demand for wireless products.

In Play

On the Wires

…but we knew this….

It has been a nice 2 quarters where we have ignored Europe’s woes, but can we really be immune ?

“WASHINGTON (AP) — Employers likely added more than 200,000 jobs for a third straight month in February, adding to evidence that the recovery is building momentum.

Economists forecast that the economy likely generated a net gain of 210,000 jobs, according to FactSet. That’s below January’s 243,000 jobs but still a healthy figure. The unemployment rate, which has fallen for five straight months, is projected to stay 8.3 percent.

If the unemployment rate were to fall for a sixth straight month, it would mark the first such streak since 1984.

It will be hard to match the jobs report for January. The employment gains came from across many industries and up and down the pay scale. Manufacturing, restaurants and hotels, retail, and professional services such as accounting all reported big job gains.

A key reason why the unemployment rate has dropped since last year is that many out-of-work people have stopped looking for work. Only people without jobs who are actively seeking one are counted as unemployed.

A sustained rise in the number of people looking for jobs would be a good sign, even if it pushed up the unemployment rate.

Friday’s report comes as a host of data points to an improving economy and job market. Weekly applications for unemployment benefits have fallen about 14 percent in six months. Though they ticked up last week, average applications remain near a four-year low….”

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The bear case for today’s report

Video

Bulls expect better growth out of tech in the coming quarters….

All joking aside Rick is a genius next to Glenn….

Ditto that sentiment…

Source

“The German criticism of a mess they themselves have enabled (and benefit from via peripheral current account deficits funded via TARGET2 as shown previously here) at the ECB continues, and following public protests by Bundesbank head Jens Weidmann about recent ECB activity, it is the turn of former ECB executive board member Juergen Stark to take center stage. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine, warned that following the massive expansion in the ECB’s balance sheet, in which it is clear to anyone that the ECB will accept used candy bar wrappers as collateral, that “the balance sheet of the euro system, isn’t only gigantic in size but also shocking in quality.”

Of course, with the ECB now the bad banks’ bad bank, this is not at all surprising. Keep in mind that the recent $1.3 trillion balance sheet expansion was supposedly not the equivalent of “printing money” because the ECB made the cash available in the form of a loan in exchange for collateral. The problem is that the ECB accepted literally everything that was not nailed down and proceeded to give 100 cents on the dollar for some unamortized book value associated with it. The end result was the already documented here first encroaching ECB initiated margin calls which may or may not be an added twist in the European liquidity situation. However one thing is certain: the quality of the ECB’s balance sheet has deteriorated massively, as the European central bank rushes to catch up to the Fed in terms of asset “quality” backing the currency.

Marketwatch has more on the FAZ interview:

[Stark] added the structure of the balance sheet is a cause for concern because increasingly short-term debt claims are being replaced by long-term ones and this will make it more difficult for the bank to reverse its loose monetary policy.

 

With his comments, the bank’s former hawk Stark is backing Germany’s central bank president Jens Weidmann. The head of the Bundesbank told Der Spiegel weekly magazine over the weekend that requirements for banks’ cheap loans have been “very generous” and the program calms the situation in the short term, but this calm could be deceptive. He was concerned about the collateral requirements that the banks had to provide.

 

The ECB’s balance sheet soared past the EUR3 trillion level last week partly because the bank has flooded markets with over EUR500 billion in cheap loans for banks.

Of course, this long-term deterioration in prospects for yet another central bank means that it has bought a short-term reprieve, as has been reflected by rising asset prices. However, what happens when the effect of this latest dilution in the value of the paper currency fades, or worse, when the ECB’s balance sheet becomes non-performing and confidence in the montary authority is lost?

Well, since that will be “someone else’ problem” why worry?”

“Business Insider recently spoke with investment guru Jim Rogers on a myriad of issues. Yesterday, we shared with you Roger’s thoughts on commodities and the U.S. economy.

Today, we share with you his bullish perspective on China.

…You’re a China bull. Could you tell me the one thing that you think China bears have got wrong?

Not quite sure. If you mean the people who say China is going to explode. Those guys have been saying that for three years. I guess someday they’ll be right. So far they’ve been dead wrong, for years. There will be setbacks in China along the way. In America in the19th century we had 15 depressions with a capital “D,” we had no human rights, we had not much rule of law, (and we) had a horrible civil war, yet we became the most successful country in the 20th century.

China is going to have plenty of setbacks but what these guys are mainly missing is China has been in decline for three or four hundred years but started turning it around in 1978. And there’s a long history of entrepreneurship, capitalism, they have the brains, they have the know-how, there are many overseas Chinese who will bring back money and management ability. And the Chinese have a very, very high savings rate. They save over 35 percent of their income and so even if they start going off, they’ve got something to fall back on, as opposed to America and the rest of the world….”

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