http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxDxXplRZyc&feature=g-all-u&context=G21e22beFAAAAAAAAJAA

Data provided by The PPT

A bipartisan bill on insider trading that had been steamrolling through Congress has ground to a halt.

The Senate and House last month overwhelmingly approved different versions of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle predicted some version of the bill would reach President Obama’s desk swiftly.

But what had been a legislative locomotive is now attracting something quite common in an election year: finger-pointing.

Democrats in the House and a senior Senate Republican want provisions on political intelligence added to the bill. House Republican leaders, who scrapped that part of the legislation, say it’s up to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to make a decision of whether to go to conference or pass the House-passed version. Reid, meanwhile, isn’t saying much….

….One thing is clear: The ball is in Reid’s court, and has been for a while.

On March 1, Craig Holman, government-affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, said, “Everyone is waiting for Reid to make a decision.”

Source

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s food police have struck again!

Outlawed are food donations to homeless shelters because the city can’t assess their salt, fat and fiber content, reports CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer.

Glenn Richter arrived at a West Side synagogue on Monday to collect surplus bagels — fresh nutritious bagels — to donate to the poor. However, under a new edict from Bloomberg’s food police he can no longer donate the food to city homeless shelters.

It’s the “no bagels for you” edict.

“I can’t give you something that’s a supplement to the food you already have? Sorry that’s wrong,” Richter said.

Richter has been collecting food from places like the Ohav Zedek synagogue and bringing it to homeless shelters for more than 20 years, but recently his donation, including a “cholent” or carrot stew, was turned away because the Bloomberg administration wants to monitor the salt, fat and fiber eaten by the homeless.

Read the rest here.

Diana B. Henriques

Bernie Madoff hated e-mail. He rarely used it at his high-tech Wall Street trading firm. When others did, he fretted about the trail it left behind. He wasn’t crazy about letters, either. A staffer had standing orders to destroy his correspondence with one important client. Even after December 2008, when the world learned that ­Madoff had run the largest Ponzi scheme in history, few personal letters surfaced. He always preferred to deal with people face-to-face.

But early in his 150-year prison sentence that all changed. His wife, Ruth, stopped visiting. His estranged older son, Mark, committed suicide; his surviving son, Andrew, never visited and swore he never would. His encounters with the world beyond the prison’s razor-wire perimeter shrank down to occasional meetings with lawyers.

In September 2010, in the first months of this intensifying isolation, Bernie Madoff became my pen pal–forced by captivity to rely almost entirely on e-mail and letters to carry out his last, desperate mission.

That mission: rewriting history–his own history. Where better to start than with his biographer?

I first interviewed Madoff in person at the medium-security prison in Butner, N.C. in August 2010 for my book The Wizard of Lies (Times Books, 2011). It traces the roots of his dishonesty to 1962 and details his many cliff-hanger escapes from detection, his precipitous downfall in 2008 and the epic legal struggle over the wreckage he left behind.

After that first visit–I saw him again early last year– we began to exchange letters. Soon Madoff enrolled me in the closed prison e-mail system. We have corresponded ever since, at least monthly, more often weekly, sometimes several times a day.

Read the rest here.

By Steven Russolillo

While the stock market is taking a breather today from its marathon rally off the early-October lows, investors still remain pretty upbeat about the future.

There’s still lots to like about this market. The economic recovery keeps puttering along, Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis has simmered down and major stock indexes have returned to levels last seen prior to the financial crisis. The S&P 5o0 is up about 12% this year 28% from early October.

Everything’s all good, right? Not quite, says Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group. He outlines six potential “investment sinkholes” that could derail the current rally.

Read the rest here.

How does the government have a right to filter what is reported as news?

Full Article

via newyorker.com

I am Marie-Céline Dundelle, and I do not need a book contract to reveal that French women are superior in all matters. Our secret lies in an attitude toward life, a point of view that I can only call Frenchy. For example, let us discuss weight loss. The American woman obsesses over every calorie and sit-up, while in France we do not even have a word for fat. If a woman is obese, we simply call her American. Whenever my friend Jeanne-Hélène has gained a few pounds, I will say to her, “Jeanne-Hélène, you are hiding at least two Americans under your skirt, and your upper arms are looking, how you say, very Ohio.”

To maintain my figure, I eat only half portions of any food, always arranging it on my plate in the shape of a semicolon. For exercise, at least once a day I approach a total stranger and slap him. And late each afternoon I read a paragraph of any work of acclaimed American literary fiction, which makes me vomit.

As for family life, Americans are far too concerned with a child’s self-esteem and accomplishments. The French woman knows that to build a child’s inner strength it is best either to completely ignore the child or to belittle him. As I was giving birth to my daughter, I refused to put down my copy of French Vogue. When it was over, I turned to my husband and remarked, “I have just had an unusually large bowel movement that will never be as attractive as me.” During my son’s thirteenth-birthday party, I ordered him to remove all his clothing, and I told the assembled guests, “You see? That is why we raised him as a girl.” My wisdom can be traced to the influence of my own mother. When I was five years old, I asked her, “What is love?” She took my small, flowerlike face in her slender hands and replied, “What do I look like, Yoda?”

Although we French are renowned for our sophistication in matters of romance, French men have a reputation for being cads. Americans will point a finger at Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is indeed a portly, repugnant fellow and a man who has been accused of assaulting women. When asked about Strauss-Kahn’s participation in orgies, his lawyer stated that Strauss-Kahn may have been unaware that the women involved were prostitutes because they were naked. Yet Strauss-Kahn’s wife has stood by him, for a simple reason: because she has married a French man, at least she will never have to say, “My name is Mrs. Newt Gingrich.”

The French woman is known for being effortlessly chic. I have, in fact, offered tutorials on elegance to American women. I will hand an American an Hermès scarf and ask her to tie it somewhere on her body, anywhere but around her neck. A French woman might use the scarf to secure a ponytail, or she’ll knot it loosely around the strap of her Chanel handbag. Sadly, most of my American pupils either use the scarf as a makeshift sling or eat it. I have attempted to counsel many American women against overdressing. I told one woman, “I’m going to turn my back, and I want you to take off three things.” A moment later, when I faced her, the woman had removed her teeth, one of her eyes, and an Ace bandage.

French culture remains unmatched. Our films include rollicking farces, searing documentaries, and quietly explosive investigations of family life. In these films, to avoid vulgarity, nothing happens, and none of the actors’ faces ever move. French filmmaking has recently reached a peak with the almost entirely silent Oscar-winning movie “The Artist.” Truecinéastes say that the ultimate French film will be a still photograph of a dead mime.

The French woman has given so much to the world. Marie Antoinette alone has inspired books, movies, operas, and the hair style and perspective of Donald Trump. Our current First Lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, is not only a role model but an ex-model. But the most glorious and eternal symbol of French womanhood is, of course, Joan of Arc, because she was a cigarette. ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2012/03/26/120326sh_shouts_rudnick#ixzz1pgvEKaf5

3:00 pm : Momentum behind the broad market’s upward climb has stalled. That has left the major equity averages mired in negative territory with modest losses as they enter the final hour of the day.

Looking ahead to what’s on tap for tonight and tomorrow, both Oracle (ORCL 29.74, -0.02) and Jabil Circuit (JBL 26.44, -0.69) will release their quarterly numbers after the close. Tomorrow morning brings the latest from General Mills (GIS 38.76, +0.04). The latest monthly existing home sales numbers will be released Wednesday at 10:00 AM ET. Weekly oil inventory numbers will be posted at 10:30 AM ET.

Market Update

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdGJaGbLj5E 450 300]

Who & what  killed the bees ?

Source 

“If the Internet were a country, by 2016 it would rank behind the US, China, Japan, and India in the size of its GDP — $4.2 trillion. That’s bigger even than Germany. Considering that the Internet economy has only been with us for about 20 years, that’s a phenomenal number.

In a new report on what the Internet economy means to the G-20 group of developed nations, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) observes:

[The economic impact of the Internet] demonstrates that no one—individual, business, or government—can afford to ignore the ability of the Internet to deliver more value and wealth to more consumers and citizens more broadly than any economic development since the Industrial Revolution.

The report notes that over the next five years, the annual growth rate of the G-20 Internet economy will be 8%, a higher rate than nearly any traditional sector. The Internet economy will contribute 5.7% of the European Union’s GDP by 2016, and 5.3% of the GDP for the full G-20. In developing markets, BCG estimates that the Internet economy will grow at an average annual rate of 18% (from a much smaller base).

The BCG report is available here. “

Getting beyond basic security when do we say the line has been crossed ?

No reports yet of any people in harms way….

Developing…

Taxpayer dollars made profits possible…no ? So should the Fed handover some of its profits to America ?

• Source

An ETF of home builder stocks is trouncing the broader market. But that may not necessarily mean housing has bottomed. Many of the stocks in the ETF are NOT builders.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — When is a homebuilder not a homebuilder? When it’s in an index of homebuilder stocks, of course!

The SPDR S&P Homebuilders (XHB) exchange traded fund has surged this year, leading many to speculate that the housing market has really, honestly, we’re not fooling around this time, cross our hearts and hope to die, bottomed.

The builders ETF is up a stunning 26% already this year. But here’s the thing. A big chunk of the companies in the fund that are doing well are not really builders.

Shares of Select Comfort (SCSS), manufacturer of the popular Sleep Number beds, is up more than 50% this year. It makes up 3.3% of the fund’s assets.

The ETF, which tracks the S&P Homebuilders Select Industry index, also includes many companies that have ties to the housing market, but whose fortunes may be improving for reasons beyond what’s going on with real estate in the U.S.

Consider Whirlpool (WHR,Fortune 500). The appliance manufacturer makes up about 3.5% of the ETF’s weighting. Shares are up more than 60% this year. But is it really because of optimism about the U.S. housing market? ”

Read more

If organic growth does not materialize then subsidizing growth with debt may be tough sledding going forward…   

In an effort to restructure HP will merge two divisions to allow for more oversight and to unlock shareholder value….