“(Reuters) – Social media company Facebook Inc said on Thursday it reached the 1 billion active monthly users threshold last month, and is up by 45 million users since June.

Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, hit the 1 billion milestone on September 14 at 12:45 p.m. Pacific time, the company said on its website. It added that it had 600 million mobile users, according to a fact sheet posted on its website

The 1 billion user count is up from the end of June, when it had 955 million active monthly users. The company also said it has seen 1.13 trillion “likes,” or endorsements by users, since the company launched the feature in February 2009. Many of the ad campaigns that companies conduct on Facebook are designed to garner likes.

It said 219 billion photos were uploaded as of September. Excluding deleted photos, about 265 billion photos have been uploaded since 2005.

About 17 billion location-tagged posts were made on the website, Facebook said, and 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times since September 2011.”

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“LONDON (Reuters) – The biggest threat to Spain’s investment grade status is its intensifying recession, Fitch’s head of sovereign ratingssaid on Thursday, although proposed support measures such asECB bond buying could help turn the situation around.

Spain, which continues to resist making a formal request for aid, is expected to see its economy shrink substantially over the next two years as the combination of high unemployment, painful spending cuts and an Exodus of capital bites.

The head of the country’s central bank admitted on Thursday that next year’s decline was likely to be closer to the 1.5 percent drop estimated by bank analysts than the 0.5 p0ercent forecast by the Spanish government last week.

“The biggest threat from our perspective to Spain’s investment grade status is actually that the recession there intensifies and that spills into greater concerns about bank asset quality as well as the solvency of the Spanish state,” David Riley said in an interview with Reuters Insider Television. (To watch click http://link.reuters.com/neb23t)”

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$SRPT, $OCN, $LEAP, $JPM, $PCS,

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Gapping up

ITMN +9.6%, BBY +6.1%, INVE +5.4%, RECN +4.6%, FIRE +2.2%,

PCS +2%, SVU +1.7%, DB +1.4%, SSYS +2.6%,  NFLX +2%, WPRT +1.5%,

NSC +0.7%, CSX +0.5%, SRPT +125.8%, VVUS +2%, MLNX +2%

Gapping down 

XRTX -13.8%, ATRS -10.7%, RIGL -5.3%, SPN -4%, ARI -2.9%, NYMT -2.3%,

BGS -1.9%, SDRL -1.4%, POT -1.5%, AMRN -1.4%,  ANN -1.3%, SNN -0.9%,

CIG -0.6%

In Play ,

On the Wires 

“The U.S. economic morass just gets worse and worse, but the presidential election is unlikely to offer a solution, says Pimco CEO Mohamed El-Erian.

That’s because “[s]adly, neither [President Barack] Obama nor [Republican Mitt] Romney has yet offered a meaningful, forward-looking economic reform program to address the problems,” El-Erian writes in Foreign Policy.

Those problems include a malfunctioning labor market, unsustainable public finances, a broken credit system, inadequate infrastructure and a lagging education system.”

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“Societe Generale strategist Dylan Grice isn’t exactly an optimist when it comes to the global economy and social stability.

“I am more worried than I have ever been,” he writes in a commentary obtained by Business Insider. “I fear the defining feature of coming decades will be a Great Disorder of the sort which has defined past epochs and scarred whole generations.”

So what’s going to cause this Armageddon? Global central bank easing, Grice says.”

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“The world economy will take at least 10 years to emerge from the financial crisis that began in 2008, the International Monetary Fund’s Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard said in an interview published on Wednesday.

Blanchard told Hungarian website Portfolio.hu, in an interview conducted on September 18 that Germany would have to accept higher inflation and a real strengthening of its purchasing power as part of the solution to Europe’s problems.

But even though the focus was on Europe’s troubles now, he said, the United States also had a fiscal problem which it had to resolve.”

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Higher prices to come ?

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“BlackRock Inc. (BLK)’s Laurence D. Fink, who has been trying to persuade retail investors to get out of cash, said the U.S. is about a year away from having a more robust economy.

“When you talk about macro issues in the U.S., our banking system is far better than most banking systems and our housing crisis is 90 percent behind us,” Fink, chairman and chief executive officer of the world’s largest asset manager, said in an Oct. 1 interview from his New York office.

Fink has been urging investors for more than a year to buy equities as the U.S. economyexpanded and the stock market rallied. BlackRock today started the third phase of a five-year branding campaign, with a series of advertisements telling savers to get out of cash and low-yielding bonds and suggesting they put money in high-quality stocks, exchange-traded funds and products that generate higher income.”

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“Hedge fund manager Doug Kass disagrees with the notion that the Federal Reserve’s latest round of quantitative easing (QE) will spark a rally for Treasurys.

“I maintain the view that shorting the U.S. fixed-income market is still the trade of the decade,” he writes on Real Money Pro.

The 10-year Treasury yield stood at 1.62 percent Monday, down from 1.77 percent Sept. 13, the day before the Fed announced QE3.”

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“The United States is in danger of falling into another recession, while monetary-stimulus measures are artificially pumping up stock prices well above where they should be and doing nothing for the fundamental economy, said billionaire real-estate magnate Sam Zell.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is currently trading around 13,515 thanks mainly to Fed intervention, but strip out monetary support and the index would likely fall more than 4,000 points if corporate and economic fundamentals truly reflected share prices, said Zell.

“I think the environment is tough, confidence is low,” Zell told CNBC.”

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“(Reuters) – Ranjana Bhandari and her husband knew the natural gas beneath their ranch-style home in Arlington, Texas, could be worth a lot – especially when they got offer after offer from Chesapeake Energy Corp.

Chesapeake wanted to drill there, and the offers could have netted the couple thousands of dollars in a bonus and royalties. But Bhandari says they ultimately declined the deals because they oppose fracking in residential areas. Fracking, slang for hydraulic fracturing, is a controversial method used to extract gas and oil.”

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“A compounding lack of confidence in the future has kept American companies from investing in their businesses and is leading the country back into recession, real estate mogul Sam Zell told CNBC.”

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We could see many states and foreign pension plans sue large banks for losses and accountability in the MBS market.

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Jefferies global head of equity strategy Sean Darby warns in his latest note to clients that a key change in the underlying fundamentals of the stock market rally is going unnoticed amid all of the talk about QE3 and the U.S. elections.

Darby writes that “corporate earnings are now forecast to drop in 3Q after consecutive quarterly gains since the 2008 financial crisis.”

From the note:

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In play ,

On the Wires 

Want to know what some billionaires are doing with their pieces ?

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In the context of historical evidence and outcomes, present market conditions give us no choice but to remain highly defensive. Valuations remain rich on the basis of normalized earnings (which are better correlated with subsequent returns than numerous popular alternatives based on forward operating earnings, the Fed Model and the like). Investor sentiment is overcrowded on the bullish side even as corporate insiders are liquidating at a rate of eight shares sold for every share purchased – a surge that Investors Intelligence describes as a “panic.” Market conditions remain steeply overbought on an intermediate and long-term basis, with the S&P 500 still near its upper Bollinger bands (two standard deviations above the 20-period moving average) on weekly and monthly resolutions. We continue to observe wide divergences in market action, from century-old criteria such as the weakness in transports versus industrials (which suggests an unwanted buildup of inventories) to more subtle divergences and signs of exhaustion in market internals.

Overall, we continue to estimate a steeply negative return/risk for stocks on horizons from 2-weeks to 18 months….

Read the rest here.

“(MoneyWatch) Labor strife between American Airlines and its pilots is grounding flights and angering passengers affected by flight cancellations and delays.

The bankrupt carrier says it has had to cancel hundreds of flights because of an increase in the number of pilots calling in sick. The pilots, angry over a contract imposed on them cutting their pay and benefits, also appear to be causing problems when they do show up. In the last month, four times as many flights as usual have been cancelled for maintenance issues resulting from last-minute plane inspections ordered by pilots.

In a report earlier this week, Ray Neidl, an analyst with Maxim Group, wrote that the pilots were the most important labor group at American, and that a deal with them was crucial.”

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