Global Markets Take Pause and Pullback a Bit

Nothing too drastic; Taiwan and Australia are down the most in Asia while Prague and Madrid put in the worst performance in Europe.

Asia

Europe

Futures

Currencies

Commodities

LIBOR, EURIBOR, 10 year yields for Italy, Spain, France, and Germany

via WSJ 

Joe Kline for The Wall Street JournalFedEx Ground delivery-truck driver Ed Weiland organizes packages in the back of his truck in Bend, Ore.

The morning after Jeremy Lin sank a thrilling, last-second three-pointer that lifted the New York Knicks over the Toronto Raptors and gave “Linsanity” its latest, rapturous chapter, the mysterious basketball oracle who saw it coming almost two years ago woke up in Bend, Ore., and blended himself a healthy green shake: celery, spinach, kale, orange juice. He put on his uniform, packed some trail mix for the road and pulled on his winter hat.

Then he went off to his day job: driving a FedEx Ground delivery truck.

In May 2010, an unsung numbers hobbyist named Ed Weiland wrote a long-term forecast of Jeremy Lin for the basketball website Hoops Analyst. At the time, Lin was a lightly regarded, semi-known point guard who had completed his final season at Harvard. But Weiland saw NBA material. He emphasized how well Lin played in three nonconference games against big schools: Connecticut, Boston College and Georgetown. He noted how Lin’s performance in two unsexy statistical categories—two-point field-goal percentage (a barometer of inside scoring ability) and RSB40 (rebounds, steals and blocks per 40 minutes) compared favorably to college numbers put up by marquee NBA guards like Allen Iverson and Gary Payton. Weiland concluded that Lin had to improve on his passing and leadership at the point, but argued that if he did, “Jeremy Lin is a good enough player to start in the NBA and possibly star.”

In the wake of Lin’s historic New York explosion, Weiland’s eerily prescient post has quickly recirculated around the Internet, as a rare example of someone who saw potential in a player who wasn’t drafted and was abandoned by two teams before getting a chance with the Knicks. Traffic rushing to Weiland’s 2010 Lin piece briefly crashed the Hoops Analyst website after Lin torched the Lakers for 38 points Friday, and his wisdom has been compared with the groundbreaking number-crunching in the baseball best seller “Moneyball,” which became a recent Hollywood movie. A tribute to Weiland’s foresight on the Yahoo Sports site The Post Game ended with, “Brad Pitt’s on line 1.”

Monitoring from his silver Toshiba laptop, Weiland has been amused by the new appreciation of his work. A 51-year-old father of two, grandfather of one, vegan and amateur trail runner who lives by himself in a region full of cyclists and snowboarders, Weiland doesn’t fit the profile of a 21st-century sports wonk.

“You were probably expecting a 22-year-old MIT graduate,” Weiland said Wednesday, in his first interview since Lin-mania began.

A Bench-Warmer’s Star Run

European Pressphoto Agency

Weiland grew up in Upper Michigan, near Norway, a city about a two-hour drive north of Green Bay, Wis. He played basketball, but never on a school team. He enrolled at Northern Michigan University but didn’t graduate. But he remained intrigued by mathematics. In the 80s Weiland became fascinated by the work of Bill James, an ex-security guard whose detailed baseball analysis would later help revolutionize that sport. For fun, Weiland began to compile his own data. “As long as I remember, he’s had spiral notebooks full of numbers,” said Weiland’s daughter, Jana, 29. “He had so much random knowledge of players and teams.”

A fan of the Michael Jordan Bulls, Weiland was living in Chicago when he began to find like-minded hobbyists on the Internet. He began self-publishing his insights online. Weiland connected with Hoops Analyst in the mid-2000s. “He had a special interest in translating how NCAA players would do when they came to the NBA,” said the site’s founder, Harlan Schreiber. “Jeremy Lin is just an example of what he’s been doing for years.”

Weiland is quick to point out he wasn’t the only stathead to take an early interest in Lin, and adds that he’s made plenty of head-slapping mistakes, like badly shortchanging Blazers forward LaMarcus Aldridge. But what makes his 2010 post stand out is how sharply it sees Lin’s athleticism and ability to rise up in big moments, the very traits the 23-year-old has displayed since being inserted into the Knicks lineup. Weiland made Lin a centerpiece of his 2010 pre-draft analysis, a possible hidden surprise. “Part of my thinking was that maybe he’d break out,” he said.

More ‘Linsanity’

• The Daily Fix: We Should’ve Seen Lin Coming
• Lin’s Legend Grows With Late Theatrics
• What Linsanity Says About New York
• Some Lin-iment for the NBA
• Speakeasy: Lin on Kobe Bryant, God and His Fast Break to Fame
• Daily Fix: Linsanity Officially Crosses the Border
• Opinion: Jeremy Lin Is All American

But Weiland never expected Lin to go as “Linsane” as this. Entering Wednesday night’s Knicks-Kings game, Lin was averaging 27.2 points and 8.8 assists in five scintillating starts. He is on the current cover of Sports Illustrated, and was named the NBA’s Eastern Conference player of the week. Weiland believes Lin’s numbers will come down when Carmelo Anthony returns to the New York lineup, but not drastically.

“When this all flattens out, I’m guessing he’ll be scoring in the high teens, say 18 points, with 10 assists,” he said. “That’s an All-Star point guard, or at least borderline.”

Meanwhile, Weiland continues to scour the NCAA, and he shared his enthusiasm for a pair of current players: Tony Mitchell of North Texas, and Jae Crowder at Marquette. By now, many of Weiland’s friends and colleagues know about his side life examining sports. “He’s got a real knack for numbers,” said Weiland’s boss, Vince VandenBosch. “Real smart guy.”

“I don’t think he set out to get recognized for this,” said Jana Weiland. “I think it’s really cool.”

Ed Weiland said that he’d once hoped to turn his stats hobby into a professional career, but it was “never a burning ambition.” He compared it to friends who played music for love. He confessed he’d never even spoken to Schreiber, the Hoops Analyst founder, communicating with the website only via email. Until late Wednesday, Schreiber had no idea what Weiland did for a living.

“I’ve lived a happily quiet life,” Weiland said. “And it’s still happily quiet.”

And with that, the man who anticipated the beginning of “Linsanity” said goodbye. There were deliveries to be made, and he needed to get to his truck.

The appeal of internships to employers at Chinese factories is not unlike that for many employers at white-collar offices in Los Angeles or London: free or low-cost labor by eager, energetic workers who earn few, if any, benefits, doing essential work. In China, where the “internship” has migrated from the West, Foxconn may be the tip of the iceberg. “What Foxconn and Apple’s other Chinese suppliers do—and Apple’s willingness to tolerate it—is completely par for the course for manufacturing in China,” says Perlin, who’s spent years working and studying in the country. “Forced labor is a major part of the Chinese economy, in many different respects, and our dependence on Chinese goods binds us to that every day. Forced internships like the ones at Foxconn appear to be somewhat common as well. What may be different here is the scale and the high-level government collusion.”

MUST READ

Still no triple digit loss yet this year. The bears were close, but dip buyers came in right at the close putting in a huge buy spike of volume.

Dow down 97

S&P down 7

NASDAQ down 16

A very interesting look at the markets

Source

A restaurant called “The Heart Attack Grilled” finally earned its name on Saturday when a customer eating one of their Triple Bypass Burgers had a cardiac arrest.

“At the time of the incident I was performing bypass procedures on other patients,” restaurant owner Jon Basso told Raw Story. “My ‘head’ nurse informed me that one of our patients was having an actual heart attack.”

Basso comes to work dressed as a “doctor” and his waitresses wear sexy nurse costumes, but on this night they had to call in trained medical professionals.

Energy Conversion Devices files for chapter 11

“Earlier this week, White House economic adviser Gene Sperling announced his support for changes in the tax structure. “[W]e need a global minimum tax so that people have the assurance that nobody is escaping doing their fair share as part of a race to the bottom or having our tax code actually subsidized and facilitate people moving their funds to tax havens,” Sperling said at an official White House meeting. He even indicated that President Obama “supports” this change.

Well today, in a speech the president is delivering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Obama announced the thrust of what amounts to a “global minimum tax”—even if he avoided using the controversial phrase.”

Full article

“Greek President Karolos Papoulias slammed Germany’s finance minister for recent comments about his country as stalled bailout talksstoked tensions between Greece and the northern European countries funding its rescue.

“I don’t accept insults to my country by Mr. Schaeuble,” Papoulias, who fought in the resistance against the Nazis during World War II, said in a speech today. “I don’t accept it as a Greek. Who is Mr. Schaeuble to ridicule Greece? Who are the Dutch? Who are the Finns? We always had the pride to defend not just our own freedom, not just our own country, but the freedom of all of Europe.”

Papoulias’s comments came as Wolfgang Schaeuble and other European officials pushedGreece to gouge more cuts out of its budget to qualify for a new bailout that would stave off an economic collapse. Schaeuble today blamed Greece’s New Democracy party, the second largest, for holding up agreement on a new rescue package and his deputy, Steffen Kampeter, compared Greece to a “bottomless pit.”

Greek politicians are expressing their frustration after European finance ministers last week rejected a Greek austerity package worth 7 percent of gross domestic product. That prompted New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras to complain that a gun was being held to the country’s head. George Karatzaferis, head of Laos, the third party in the governing coalition, said the country “could do without the German boot.”

Playing With Fire

“We are continually faced with new terms,” Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos told reporters in Athens today. “In the euro area, there are plenty who don’t want us anymore. There are some playing with fire, domestically and abroad. Some are playing with torches and some are playing with matches. But the risk is equally great.”

Full article

via FoxBusiness.com

Reuters

Read more: http://trade.cc/alxvixzz1mU0UsEVD

The Federal Reserve appears open to the idea of a third round of bond purchases to boost a still-modest recovery. But members remain divided over when or whether to take that step.

The Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington, DC.

Minutes of the Fed’s  Jan. 24-25 meeting show that some Fed officials thought such bond purchases should begin soon because unemployment remains high and inflation low.

U.S. stock markets held their sharp losses on Wednesday following the minutes release.

Others said such a step should be taken only if the economy weakened further or if inflation stayed below the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent.

The debate took place at a meeting in which the Fed decided to hold its benchmark interest rate at record lows until at least late 2014. One Fed official argued that the central bank might need to consider abandoning that plan to keep inflation low.

Source

Slim Shady

Politicians……

Parents are borrowing more money than students

Fraud is cool when you pay a 1000th of what you made perpetrating the fraud. This is a great message to our children and society at large. CRIME PAYS!

Here are today’s high volume/high hybrid movers, click her for charts.

A recent wave of selling has forced stocks lower, making for weak trade after it had been mostly mixed.

News that officials in China intend to expand the country’s investment in Europe rekindled buying interest ahead of the open, but enthusiasm was dampened by concerns that efforts to get bailout funds to Greece could become bogged down because of doubts that Greece may not fully follow through with its pledges for new austerity measures.

The broad market spent the morning chopping along with a modest gain, but a sudden barrage of selling has since sent it into the red. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq is now at the neutral line after it had been up nearly 1% about 30 minutes ago. Tech stocks were a primary source of strength for the Nasdaq, but they, too, have been undercut by the recent wave of selling. As for the Dow, lackluster action among blue chips has left it in the red for almost the entire day.

Comcast (CMCSA 28.56, +1.31) and Teva Pharma (TEVA 45.38, +1.86) have been standouts following their latest quarterly reports, which featured upside earnings surprises. Deere & Co. (DE 85.90, -3.15) also posted earnings that exceeded what had been expected, but the stock has slumped to test its three-week lows. Meanwhile, apparel retailer Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF 49.50, +4.91) shares have surged 11% even though the company’s latest quarterly earnings came short of the Wall Street consensus. However, the company’s management reiterated their full-year guidance, which they actually deemed conservative.

As for economic data, the eurozone reported a 0.3% decline in fourth quarter GDP. Germany’s GDP declined by 0.2%, but economic activity in France expanded by 0.2%. Although largely unimpressive, the headline numbers were generally a bit better than or on the order of what had been expected. Domestic data featured an improved survey on manufacturing activity in the New York, flat monthly industrial production, and an improved monthly Housing Market Index. On their way are minutes from the most recent FOMC meeting (2:00 PM ET).

Market Update

“From Mohamed El-Erian’s latest editorial for latest editorial for Project Syndicate:

Greece need not continue to follow Argentina’s miserable example of ten years ago. Yet, unless Greek and European officials reflect on that example and adapt accordingly, Greece will be driven down the same dangerous dead-end path.

El-Erian is the CEO and co-CIO of bond behemoth.

He draws various ominous comparisons between Argentina and Greece.

In particular, EU and IMF officials’ aversion to contemplating the long term results of their actions—both in regard to Greece and their own credibility. He draws the analogy here between Greece’s current situation and Argentina, where the IMF continually wrung “over-promised and under-delivered” commitments out of the Argentinian government:

A blame game broke out over who was responsible for “losing” Argentina. Official creditors, led by the IMF, pointed to the Argentine government’s repeated policy failures. The government countered that official creditors were nickel-and-diming the country, rather than providing the financial cushion needed to restore confidence and re-engage private capital. Neither side seemed willing to acknowledge what was obvious to many: the country’s economic and financial framework gave it little chance of addressing the dual problem of too little growth and too much debt.

But it was ultimately the citizens who sped the process along. Fed up with the government and its creditors and fearing the worst case scenario, they got sick of the pain of austerity and systematically withdrew their funds from Argentinian banks. Not to mention that Argentina’s neighbors were already planning for the contingency of catastrophe.

Greece can still avoid this outcome, El-Erian writes, but it must take four steps:”

Read more

“One of the local papers here in Chile ran an interesting story a few days ago about the number of young Spanish immigrants coming to Chile in search of work.

Fed up with the ridiculously high unemployment rate in Spain, and tired of being shut out of every single opportunity imaginable, a handful of intrepid young souls is starting to look for greener pastures abroad. And increasingly, that journey is bringing them to Chile.

The report, published in El Mostrador[Spanish-language], profiles several young people who’ve left Spain’s roughly 50% youth unemployment rate. Stymied by the lackluster prospects in Europe, and the even worse prospects (and visa challenges) in the US, they’ve set their sights on Latin America.

Most found success in Chile’s rapidly growing economy where skilled, energetic young people are in demand. For some, the opportunities here in Chile were so plentiful when they arrived that they encouraged their friends and families back home in Spain to hop a flight and make a change for the better.

Like America of the past, Chile is a country that’s friendly to productive, responsible,  hard-working people. It’s very easy to obtain a residency visa and work permit– all you need is a work contract from just about any local company, and you’re entitled to what’s called a “sujeto a contrato” visa.

This particular visa is renewed after one year. After the second year of continuous employment, you’re entitled to permanent residency. Three years later, you can apply for naturalization and a Chilean passport, as long as you meet minimum time-in-country requirements.

Best of all, you don’t even need a lawyer. Compared to what I’ve seen in Europe and North America, the red tape involved in the Chilean immigration process is minimal; local companies in Chile have tremendous latitude in hiring foreign workers without the government getting involved….”

Read more