Poll: Half of Americans Call Facebook a Fad

The poll must have hit old age homes and rotary club meetings. By nature humans are social and thrive on friendship, recognition, and the ability to show off. So I’m not sure how Facebook could be a fad.

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Italy is in recession with a third consecutive quarter of GDP slowdown.

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I know currencies are supposed to trade slow, but calling up 0.0022 a rebound is preposterous.

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“Spain’s fourth attempt in less than three years to clean up its banks, saddled with bad loans after a property market bust, didn’t go far enough to rebuild confidence in the industry.

“I don’t know why they even bothered,” Olly Burrows, a credit analyst at Rabobank International in London, said in a phone interview. “A lot of people were expecting a big announcement on a bad bank and all we really got was additional provisions to part of the real estate book.”

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Europe has been paring gains all morning and is now entering negative territory.

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“Germany helped the euro area avoid its second recession in three years as growth in the region’s largest economy offset contractions in peripheral countries.

Gross domestic product in the 17-nation euro region stagnated in the latest quarter compared with the prior three months, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said today. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for a 0.2 percent contraction. The German economy expanded 0.5 percent, compared with the 0.1 percent median estimate by economists in a separate survey.”

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“President Francois Hollande will spend his first hours as French president huddled in meetings today with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, underscoring rising concern that Greece is headed out of the euro.

Franco-German summits have become such a feature of the European financial crisis that Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Merkel became known by the single name “Merkozy.”

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“Greek President Karolos Papoulias will attempt to persuade divided party leaders today to accept his proposal for a government of prominent non-politicians to steer the country and avert new elections as doubts mount that Greece can avoid an exit from the euro area.”

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“Foreign direct investment in China fell for a sixth month in April, the longest stretch of declines since the global financial crisis, amid renewed turmoil in financial markets.

Inbound investment dropped 0.7 percent from a year earlier to $8.4 billion, the Ministry of Commerce said today in Beijing. That compares with a 6.1 percent drop in March.”

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“The Australian dollar rallied from an almost five-month low as a technical indicator suggested its recent decline was excessive.

The New Zealand dollar, known as the kiwi, earlier slid to a four-month low amid concernGreece will be forced to leave Europe’s currency union, sapping demand for riskier assets. Australian bonds rallied, sending yields to record lows, after the Reserve Bank released minutes of its latest meeting when it cut its key rate by half a percentage point.”

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World Markets

Currencies

Commodities

USD Libor

Euribor

Yields for Italy, Spain, France,  and Germany …

Here is an update on our annual stock of the year contest, click here for leaderboard.

$SVVC

First Hand Technology Value Fund  SVVC +1.79% is pretty easy to understand.  Just like GSV Capital Corp they own equity stakes in other companies, they don’t make any widgets or widgets apps themselves.  They recently picked up 100K shares of Twitter for $1.8 million.  They own 88,841 of Gilt and 125,000 shares of Yelp.  And they own 600,000 class B shares of Facebook, around ~12% of assets.

Source

Also, $SVVC is a Chuck Bennet Favorite.

And you thought this market was hard?

Simply uncanny, the mirroring of the two indices…

Peter Brandt lets the charts speak for themselves, but notes that the completion of these patterns “signifies a major trend change.”

See the charts and read Brandt’s commentary here.

On Thursday, an auditor from the Government Accountability Office told Congress that a large, vacant area of federal land “contains about as much recoverable oil as all the rest the world’s proven reserves combined.” The GAO testimony continued, stating that the feds were in “a unique position to influence the development of oil shale” since it is primarily under federal land.

Read the rest of the article here.

This will be classic.

EXCLUSIVE: The Other Guys gang is back together, this time on HBO. The pay cable network is developing a comedy project for Rob Riggle to star and produce. The single-camera comedy, based on an idea by Riggle, is being written by Adam McKay and Chris Henchy. Set in the world of bond traders in 1980s Wall Street, it revolves around a successful, hard-living boss (Riggle) who lives a dark, self-centered, unhealthy life. McKay and Henchy are executive producing with their Gary Sanchez Prods partner Will Ferrell as well as Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson, Peter Principato and Paul Young. The project, which stems from Riggle’s development deal with HBO, reunites three of the stars of The Other Guys – Ferrell, Walhberg and Riggle — with the film’s writers McKay and Henchy. It was on that movie that McKay, Wahlberg, Ferrell and Riggle formed a working relationship and set out to find a project on which to collaborate

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