It was a mixed close for the markets with the Dow gaining 30 points to 9802 despite upbeat economic news as investors continue to fret about the economic recovery. Nasdaq eased a point to 2055.

Nov 06 09 NFP just hit with 193K job losses, and a 10.3% Unemployment[More...]

by John Bougearel, author of Riding the Storm Out Tormented by a recession/depression, surging unemployment and foreclosures, plagued by policymakers and lawmakers throwing perfectly good taxpayer money at bad banks and bad policies, the stock market has been unable to gain any traction this year. In fact, the stock market has declined 29% from the Jan 6 year high. That is quite a bit of devastation in two short months, especially since it comes on the heels of the devastating market declines of 2008 since the October 2007 peak, from which the SP500 has fallen 58%. Annoyed with the new Obama administration, market participants have taken to calling the new bad economy “Obamanomics.” With the new administration continuing to serve the private self-serving interests of bad banks and insurance companies, I have taken to calling what is happening to the American people an “Obamanation.” On Friday’s NFP report, we find that it is beginning to[More...]

Late on Tuesday, Applied Materials (NASDAQ: AMAT) announced that it swung to fiscal first-quarter net loss of $133 million, or 10 cents a share, compared with a net profit of $262 million, or 19 cents a share, in the prior year quarter.[More...]

Non-farm payrolls fell 598k in the month of January, the largest decline in 35 years. Yet the US dollar rallied against the Japanese Yen and all of the higher yielding risk currencies are higher. What is going on? The price action in the currency market indicates that forex traders are becoming numb to bad (...)[More...]

by John Bougearel Citigroup posted an $8.29 billion loss in Q4 08 compared to a loss of $9.8 billion in Q4 07. The $8.29 billion loss was twice as much as estimated. More than half of those losses came from subprime related, CDO, and SIV writedowns. Offsetting the writedowns was a $2billion gain related to an accounting rule that lets companies market their liabilities to market value. FASB accounting rules and changes are riddled with flaws. The definition of market value is subject to wide variance in interpretation and the gap between market value and street value widens as the debt-deflation spiral worsens. But we won’t go there for now, suffice to say, this allowed Citi a $2 billion fictional mark-up that is at variance with the reality of debt-deflation. The only way to narrow the widening gap is to end the spiral. In other financial news, BofA posted a Q4 lows of $1.8 billlion, excluding $15.3 billion from their Merrill Lynch[More...]