In order to shield our banking system from European shock the Federal Reserve has raised capital requirements  for U.S. banks.

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“NEW YORK (AP) — McDonald’s Corp. says strength in the U.S. and Europe drove up a key revenue figure in May, but noted that ongoing economic volatility around the world is pressuring its second-quarter results.

The fast-food chain, based in Oak Brook, Ill., also warned that foreign currency translations are now expected to hurt second-quarter earnings by 7 cents per share to 9 cents per share.

Shares of McDonald’s fell $2.40 to $88.38 in premarket trading.”

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The Democrat’s political football just turned into a golfball: the “cash hoard” that companies have supposedly been sitting on his 1/2 trillion dollars smaller than previously believed.

Read the article here.

“Today, Virgin Mobile has finally put months of rumors and speculation to rest — on June 29, the prepaid Sprint subsidiary will start selling Apple’s iPhone 4 and 4S, joining Cricket as the second prepaid carrier to stock Apple’s tiny mobile juggernaut.

Virgin customers can expect to shell out $549 for the off-contract 8GB iPhone 4, and $649 for a 16B iPhone 4S. The duo of prepaid iPhones are paired with Virgin’s existing slew of Beyond Talk plans, which will set customers back $35, $45, and $55 a month for 300, 1200, and unlimited voice minutes, respectively.”

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Security breaches are a big problem and LinkedIn needs to discover and quell the breach.

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Crime pays in a world of cronyism as Bear Sterns settles a lawsuit for $275 million over omitting information and misleading investors over the firm’s financial position during it’s debacle to $0.00. No mention of guilt or jail time.

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anney notes the stock is trading down due to lower than expected guidance and sequentially slowing comp. As they expected, the co guided 2Q12 conservatively (but even lower than they were expecting. Most concerning is the deceleration in comp from 25% in 1Q12 to a guided comp of positive low double digits. LULU remains an attractive longer term growth story, and they believe earnings growth is still above 30% annually for the next several years. However, they point out the earnings growth vs. valuation disparity that has existed is likely to converge, and we expect that stock appreciation from today’s corrected levels may be more measured and more in line with actual earnings growth prospects from the co; Buy.
LULU is at $61.83 in the premarket.

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“If you’re a LinkedIn user, do yourself a favor and change your password right now — according to a new report from Dagens IT, nearly 6.5 million encrypted LinkedIn passwords were dumped onto a Russian hacker forum.

The news comes right on the heels of yet another user security kerfuffle, as the most recent LinkedIn for iOS update was found to transmit users’ meeting notes back to LinkedIn servers without their permission.

Of the millions of passwords dumped, Dagen IT reports that nearly 300,000 of them have been decrypted so far and that number seems sure to grow as users spread that hefty file around.”

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What a dog with fleas….

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Gapping up

ACOM +24.2%, LEE +21.7%, IRM +14.1%, TEF +4.9%, NOK +4%, CSTR +3.6%, GWRE +3.1%,

CHK +2.9%, ULTA +1.9%, SD +1%, CLNE +4.4%, GRPN +3.3%, FB +2.5% , MA +1.9% ,

SGEN +1.4%, SVNT +3.1% ,  CSTR +3.6%,  DRYS +7.8%,

Gapping down

MFRM -13.1%, MIND -12.6%, BOBE -6%,  VSH -1% ,  PPO -0.5%, AMLN -1.3%, KMI -3.4% ,

SCSS -15.9%, TPX -42.6%, MFRM -14.4%, MIND -10.4%, BOBE -6%,

Down another $550 million+ today.

It is single handedly destroying sentiment, down more than 3% for the day.

Wonder what the monetary benefit were for all those trades. Crime pays!

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$NFLX’s announcement of entering into the CDN market has not been received well. This reminds me of Corning moving into fiber optics. Where does $NFLX get the coin to make a capital intensive move ?

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New York, June 05, 2012 — Creditor recoveries when US leveraged buyouts default are nearly equal to recoveries in non-LBO defaults, Moody’s Investors Service says in a new special comment, “Lessons from 200 LBO Defaults.”

Of the more than 1,000 US defaults in Moody’s Ultimate Recovery Database, 200 involved companies that had undergone leveraged buyouts since 1988. The average family recovery in those LBO defaults was 54%, compared with 55% in the more than 800 defaults at companies that had not experienced LBOs.

“The high leverage of LBOs has not translated into lower creditor recoveries in defaults of companies with private equity owners or other financial sponsors,” says David Keisman, a Moody’s Senior Vice President and author of the report. “While the LBO sponsors could not spare these companies from defaulting — and may have prompted defaults through high leverage — the average family-level recovery rate in these situations was nearly the same as the rate at the non-LBO companies.”

One of the main reasons LBO recoveries have been in line with non-LBOs is the high proportion of distressed exchanges and prepackaged bankruptcies among defaulted LBOs. These types of defaults typically yield higher family-level investor recoveries than regular bankruptcies. Less than half of LBO defaults occurred through regular bankruptcies (not prepackaged), compared with nearly two thirds of non-LBO defaults, Moody’s said.

The average recovery for the bank debt at the top of a company’s capital structure was less in LBO defaults (75%) than in non-LBOs (83%) because the wide use of bank debt in LBOs left a smaller cushion of subordinated debt tranches to takes losses first.

Read more here:

Preliminary research suggests a pretax loss of $0.65 cents per share; far above Dimon’s initial estimates of $0.25 per share.

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“Which new media platform has rocketed to hundreds of millions of unique visitors, provides both utility and entertainment for the masses, and has become the destination of choice for its generation? If this were 1999, Yahoo! would be your answer. Today, that torch has been handed to Facebook. And with good reason, since they have embedded their ubiquitous social network of nearly 1 billion members into a large part of people’s lives and the digital ecosystem.”

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“There’s an old saying on Wall Street about insider buying: there are many possible reasons to sell a stock, but only one reason to buy. Back on May 31, Hercules Offshore Inc’s Director, Thomas R. Bates Jr., invested $137,000.00 into 40,000 shares of HERO, for a cost per share of $3.42. Bargain hunters tend to pay particular attention to insider buys like this one, because presumably the only reason an insider would take their hard-earned cash and use it to buy stock of their company in the open market, is that they expect to make money.”

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“Let the mobile payment wars continue! Only yesterday Square announced its ever-expanding retail availability (20,000 outlets nationwide), and today competitor Intuit GoPayment is following up with some major news of its own. Intuit is now merging its traditional POS software, QuickBooks POS, with its mobile offering (and Square rival) Intuit GoPayment.

The two solutions will now be able to communicate with each other, syncing both inventory and financial data from PC to mobile or vice versa.”

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