Underwhelming news

The U.S. Senate will leave the sweeping financial reform bill passed by the House in the inbox this week -- something to do after the Fourth of July vacation.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said bill could wait, and Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., representing a critical vote, said he would do his homework through the week reviewing the final wording in the bill that attracted just three Republican votes in the House out of a possible 176.

One can imagine a few entrenched (partisan) foot soldiers in those numbers, unable to jump across the aisle. The Senate version of the legislation was crafted, to a large degree, by pairing off one Democrat and one Republican from the Banking Committee to work on various aspects of the bill that is now spun out as Democratic from top to bottom -- and toxic to boot.

"Under the guise of financial reform, Democrats today are pushing another bill that will kill jobs, raise taxes and make bailouts permanent," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., The New York Times reported.

Republican whip Eric Cantor of Virginia assailed the bill as "a clear attack on capital formation in America," and Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, called the bill "killing an ant with a nuclear weapon."

On Wall Street, where many financial ants toil, the second quarter ended, perhaps none to soon, with the Dow Jones industrial average off 10 percent in the past three months and the Standard & Poor's and Nasdaq both down about 12 percent since the first of April.

A senior analyst for S&P, Howard Silverblatt was quoted in the Times as saying a bear market was "getting closer," elaborating Wednesday that "nobody wanted to be in the market, and this was not even a Friday."

Market influences this week included a threat by ratings agency Moody's to downgrade Spain's credit rating and an Automatic Data Processing Inc. report that the U.S. added 13,000 jobs in May to June and warned hiring for the U.S. Census 2010 had slowed.

Two months ago, the best news on the labor market was the hiring of temporary workers for the census and now that underwhelming influence is slowing down.

In the home of the brave, just before the Fourth of July break, "There just doesn't seem to be any reason to be brave right now," equity analyst Andrew Brooks at T. Rowe Price told the Times.

In international markets Thursday, the Nikkei 225 index in Japan lost 2.04 percent and the Shanghai composite index in China fell 1.02 percent. The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong slid 0.59 percent and the Sensex in India fell 1.08 percent.

In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 lost 1.49 percent.

In midday trading in Europe, the FTSE 100 in Britain shed 0.84 percent while the DAX 30 in Germany dropped 0.65 percent. The CAC 40 in France was off 1.41 percent while the pan-European DJ Stoxx 50 lost 1.13 percent.