Week in Advance: Most IPO’s to Come Public Since 2007

Dunkin’ doughnuts is set to come public, ticker DNKN.

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Planet of the Apes is no longer a science fiction movie.

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What a coincidence that all these musicians died at age 27….

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Looks as if the conditions for a Katrina like storm are in place. 2011 looks eerily similar to 2004 & 2005 when we had a bad bout with hurricanes.

Given the late timing of the season it may be an Atlantic debacle rather than a Gulf debacle. Either way along with the massive heat wave Natty gas plays should be sizzling hot until fall……no ?

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Apparently the budget talks and deficit reduction will hurt baby boomers the most.

“Basically, the U.S. as a society will either have to pay more for government, accept less in government services and benefits, or both.”

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Geithner says this will not get democratic support. He further stated it is a short term solution to a long term problem.

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Despite the above article Geithner says a debt deal will get done

Cable, Vince will not mince words in in his opinion of the ongoing debt debate in America.

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“Starting on Aug. 1, the state will begin to capture the boost in the income tax for 2011 approved by lawmakers in May, which is retroactive to the beginning of the calendar year.

Single and joint filers earning $50,000 a year will see about $200 in additional withholding through December, as will joint filers earning $100,000. Single filers making $100,000 will see about $605 disappear from their paychecks.

It starts to jump up for joint filers at the $125,000 level when $510 in additional taxes will be taken out to make up for the seven months that the new rates were in effect, but not yet collected.

At the top end, if your adjusted gross income is $1 million, by the end of December, you will have contributed $17,400 more to the state of Connecticut, while those hauling in $2 million in salary, will send in some $19,400 in additional taxes.”

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FBI says certain styles of programming code leads to the Chinese government as a primary suspect in the hacking of the IMF. Nobody on either side of the issue could be reached for comment.

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A Dave Barboza/NYT expose` on Chinese Reverse Mergers. Shows that business journalism is still worthwhile when done right. Barboza used to be the Times market writer until he moved to the China business beat. He’s been THE writer on Chinese issues since the beginning of the decade.

House Republicans are finishing work on a new proposal to resolve the standoff over the debt ceiling.  The proposal, set to be finished and crafted into the form of a bill by Sunday, will be in two parts.  The first will combine a short-term increase in the debt ceiling with spending cuts.  The second will lay the groundwork for a longer-term increase in the debt ceiling coupled with far-reaching deficit reduction.

“Senator Reid said on Friday that he is going to wait for us to move,” says a well-informed GOP House aide.  “So we’ll move.”  Another well-informed aide confirmed the basic outline of what’s happening.

Staff of the House Rules Committee is involved in the work, which is an indication that the process is nearing completion.  Before any bill can be considered on the House floor, the Rules Committee must first pass a rule setting out the process for its consideration.  Once the proposal is finished, it would likely be posted on the Rules Committee website, probably no later than Monday, so the committee could meet to consider it on Tuesday and it could be on the House floor by Wednesday.

“As I read the Constitution, the Congress writes the laws and you get to decide what you want to sign,” Boehner said, recounting what he told the president, according to two sources.

Unexplained Death thus far

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama and top congressional lawmakers on Saturday attempted to salvage a deal to stave off a catastrophic debt default after a collapse in deficit talks left both sides angry and frustrated.

Obama, a Democrat, called House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner and other congressional leaders to a meeting at 11 a.m. EDT at the White House on how the debt ceiling can be raised by August 2.

“They are going to have to explain to me how it is that we are going to avoid default,” a visibly angry Obama said on Friday after Boehner, the top Republican in Washington, informed Obama he was breaking off talks.

A senior Senate aide, speaking before the White House meeting, said the goal will be to work out a deal this weekend and have legislation ready to introduce on Monday.

With the Treasury set to run out of money to pay all of its bills on August 2, Obama feared the window may have closed for a “grand bargain” of spending cuts and tax increases in exchange for Congress raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.

The battle in Washington is over spending cuts and taxes. Obama says he has agreed to deep spending cuts that make his own Democrats uneasy but that Republicans must allow some taxes to rise, a prospect they have rejected.

Summoned to the White House were Boehner, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House.

Boehner planned to reiterate to Obama that “we must have cuts greater than the debt limit increase,” a Boehner aide said.

“We will be working throughout the weekend with leaders in the House and Senate to find a serious solution,” the aide said.

Financial markets are growing more edgy and U.S. banks and businesses are making contingency plans for the possibility of a debt default that would drive up interest rates, sink the dollar and ripple through economies around the world.

Credit rating agencies want spending restraints for the United States to keep its prized AAA rating that makes U.S. Treasuries the solid foundation for global investors and lowers borrowing costs for state governments, businesses, homeowners and consumers.

“We have now run out of time,” Obama said on Friday after talks collapsed on a deficit reduction package worth more than $3 trillion over 10 years.

Boehner said on Friday he was confident the debt ceiling would be raised next week. But he will have to overcome resistance from Tea Party movement conservatives in his own party and could run into problems for having signaled a willingness to give ground on revenue increases in closed-door talks at the White House.

‘HIGHLY DETRIMENTAL’

Both Republicans and Democrats chafed at the compromises a far-reaching deal would require before the presidential and congressional elections in November 2012, with each side accusing the other of not doing enough and demanding too much.

Boehner said talks collapsed because the White House insisted on raising taxes while refusing to get serious about cutting spending and overhauling retirement and healthcare programs. Democrats say tax loopholes and Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy must end as part of a U.S. fiscal rehabilitation.

A major barrier was how much revenue would be raised through tax reform — with Obama wanting $1.2 trillion over 10 years and Boehner putting $800 billion on the table.

“If not reversed within the next few days through crisis negotiations, this breakdown will be highly detrimental to the already fragile health of both the U.S. and global economies,” Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief investment officer at Pimco, the world’s top bond fund manager, told Reuters.

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Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, took his seat before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on May 4 to make his case for a $106 million budget increase.

Without the money, Gensler said, his agency wouldn’t be able to perform its new job of policing roughly $300 trillion in U.S. over-the-counter derivatives, a market that includes the credit-default swaps that helped push the U.S. economy into the worst recession in 70 years, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August issue.

“In 2008, both the financial system and the financial regulatory system failed the test for the American public,” Gensler, 53, told the senators. “An investment in the CFTC is warranted, because, as we saw in 2008, without oversight of the swaps market, billions of taxpayer dollars may be at risk.”

Even before Gensler had a chance to make his rounds at the Republican-controlled House, he got its response. Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican, proposed a spending bill on May 23 that called for a 15 percent CFTC budget cut to $172 million.

Although the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act required the commission to write and enforce more than 50 new rules regulating derivatives trading and commodities futures, Gensler, who’d gotten an increase for the current year, needed to tighten his belt starting on Oct. 1, as at other agencies, Kingston said.

‘Thinking Has Evolved’

The news was the latest blow to the former Wall Streeter, who has been knocked around repeatedly since he began advocating in 2009 that the huge derivatives market had to be controlled — and that his CFTC was the agency to do it.

As a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) partner and then Treasury undersecretary, Gensler had lined up with the hands-off- derivatives crowd behind the $601 trillion global market.

He says the near-collapse of the world’s financial system changed his mind about regulation.

“My thinking has evolved,” Gensler says in his ninth- floor Washington office, which is decorated with artwork by his three daughters. “I was part of the consensus view on derivatives, and it’s fair to say that the consensus missed it. We should have done more to protect the American people.”

Gensler is an unlikely agitator for reform. While he was at the Treasury, the administration of President Bill Clinton refused to regulate OTC derivatives, the financial instruments that derive their value from an underlying asset. Gensler helped push an anti-regulation bill through Congress in 2000.

FULL ARTICLE AT BLOOMBERG

Treasuries fell for the first time in three weeks as talks collapsed between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner over a deficit-cutting package as part of an agreement that would lift the nation’s debt ceiling.

Two-year note yields touched the highest in almost two weeks July 21 as Standard & Poor’s reiterated it saw a 50 percent chance of cutting the U.S. credit rating within three months and European leaders reached a deal to stem Greece’s debt crisis. Boehner said yesterday after markets closed he will instead talk with Senate leaders on a way to avoid a U.S. default. The U.S. will sell $99 billion in notes next week.

“It’s certainly a negative thing for Treasuries,” said Guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia. “The deep divisions between the parties make an agreement much tougher, but we still have the potential for 11th-hour emergency measures.”

Yields on benchmark 10-year notes rose six basis points, or 0.06 percentage point, to 2.96 percent yesterday in New York, from 2.91 percent on July 15, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader prices. The price of the 3.125 percent securities due in May 2021 fell 15/32, or $4.69 per $1,000 face amount, to 101 3/8.

Thirty-year bond yields increased one basis point to 4.26 percent. Two-year note yields were up three basis points to 0.39 percent and reached 0.41 percent on July 21, the highest level since July 8.

Treasuries pared weekly losses yesterday before Boehner’s announcement amid bets Obama and lawmakers would reach a deal to reduce the deficit, raise the debt limit and avert a default.

FULL ARTICLE AT BLOOMBERG

By BEN LEVISOHN

Has gold reached its peak? Don’t bet on it.

Most seasoned investors are familiar with the great company/bad stock phenomenon, in which a fast-growing, innovative business becomes so well appreciated by the market that its shares become quickly and chronically overvalued. The rapidly emerging social-networking industry is approaching the status of great sector/bad stocks, much as dot-com companies did about a decade ago—even if, so far, there are only a few social-media stocks that are publicly traded, issued by secondary players in the industry, at that.

There is no set definition for a social-media company, but all involve large networks of individuals directly sharing and customizing information, or accessing tailored consumer offerings, via the Internet or email. The recitation of 10- and 11-figure implied values for several companies founded just a handful of years ago has become familiar to anyone paying even a little attention.

Depending on how you carve up the industry, eight leading companies that have either gone public, filed plans for an initial stock offering or are widely expected to do so by the end of next year are now estimated to be worth a combined $200 billion. Together, these eight companies—Facebook, Groupon, Zynga, LivingSocial, Twitter, LinkedIn (ticker: LNKD), Pandora Media (P) and Zillow (Z)—collected $3.5 billion in 2010 revenue. That’s $1 billion less than, say, Washington Post (WPO), whose market value is $3.4 billion. Leaving aside Facebook, which seems to have the best shot at supporting its hypothetical $100 billion value through its market position, growth and profit margins, the rest have negligible profits at this point.

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Rising oil production in the U.S. and Canada is keeping U.S. crude prices sharply below those in the world market. That has been a boon to independent oil refiners such as Marathon Petroleum (ticker: MPC), HollyFrontier (HFC) and Western Refining (WNR), which are benefiting from plentiful oil supplies in the middle of the country.

Good times for Midwestern refiners could last several years, lifting stocks like Marathon Petroleum, which was spun off from Marathon Oil (MRO) on July 1.

Patrick Semansky/Bloomberg NewsMarathon Petroleum owns six refineries. Its giant Garyville complex in Louisiana can process 464,000 barrels a day.

Marathon Petroleum shares, near 40, trade for less than seven times projected 2011 profit of $6 a share. “Marathon has top-tier refining assets and is benefiting disproportionately from the mid-continent advantage,” says Evan Calio, an energy analyst at Morgan Stanley, who began coverage after the spinoff with an Outperform rating and a $54 price target. His earnings estimate is above consensus at about $7 a share for both 2011 and 2012.

FULL FEATURE ARTICLE FROM BARRONS