Breakfast with Dave--Rosie touts a 900 retest

How is that going to happen? We already had the retest yesterday of the downside!

There is ZERO chance of Rosie's scenario happening!

With all his rigor and intellectual superiority, he highlights this as the salient proof that the rockin rally from 666 was just a bear market bounce:

"Despite all the good news since the start of the year the overall equity market is the U.S. is down 8% from its January high--this goes to show that this was indeed a bear market rally rooted more in technicals than it was in fundamentals."

So what was the good news then????
Breakfast With Dave February 9, 2010 (David Rosenberg)

John Thain promises not to redo the CIT office

Bloomberg;
One lesson of his experience at Merrill Lynch will stick with him. Thain’s departure coincided with revelations that he’d spent $1.2 million to redecorate his office at the money-losing company when he joined in 2007. He later said the renovation was a mistake and reimbursed the firm.

At CIT, “I think I’ll keep my office exactly the way it is,” he said.

Has John Thain really tightened up his spending?

You mean the $87,000 area rugs, the  $35,000 commode, the two guest chairs for $87,000,  the curtains for $28,000 and the days of the $11,000 lamp shade are now over?

Did Thain get religion?

Because he spent money on furniture like Imelda Marcus spent it on shoes.

Or maybe John Thain found out that going to the taxpayer gloryhole wasn't as pleasant when the spotlight was on him!

Hedge funds trying to stir up fear

The Europe debt crisis is getting close to over, when we see stories that the hedge funds are attacking the countries and their currencies.

That means those who have already wanted to bet on a crisis have already done so--and now they just need to cash in on their chips, on the crisis they helped to make!


Google translation via ZH:

Development Minister and deputy secretary general of the PSOE, José Blanco, said yesterday that the sharp drop in the Spanish stock market last week was due to "attack" of financial speculators, who were "somewhat murky maneuvers" to punish the euro and weaker economies in the euro But who are these 'speculators' evil to which he referred to the minister of development? What are their names? How much money managed?

For the trading desks of major international brokers have sounded in recent sessions Brevan Howard, Moore Capital and Paulson & Co, among others, Hegde funds that manage more than 500,000 million and are among the top ten. The total figure is nearly double industry. "There have been specific macro hedge funds, which are taking positions against the euro and against the CDS (insurance coverage of non-payment) of Spain," said a broker from abroad that term around 7% of the daily volume of the Spanish stock exchange. "When these guys are short against someone, there is nothing to do. Already suffer from investment banks in late 2008 when institutions like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley saw their CDS exceeded the benchmark of 2,000 points.

Among others who have been short are the hedge funds at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, according to financial sources say.

Same thing happened to investment banks at the end of 2008 or the Bank of England ten years ago. Against that little can be done except wait until they are closing their positions, "one expert said an investment banker. But he clarifies that "we must not forget that they are the same as you did a lot of money to corporate executives and banking in general when the opposite bet.

 Which just means the PIGGS get revenge!

Capital One to double customers interest rates

Customers with a standard rate of 8% will now see rates of 15.3%.

Capital One is whacking them to offset the losses of the people who have just walked away. Here's what their spokesperson had to say:

"The economic environment has changed dramatically and we must adjust rates to account appropriately for the increased risk of lending to consumers in an economic downturn. This significant downturn means that we have had to increase rates for some of our customers by up to 7%.

Snooki's new boyfriend

 

Snooki said:

"He's actually a body builder and works at the gym," she said. "I am really excited to like show the public who he is. "He is freaking banging. We're the sexiest couple I have ever seen in my entire life so I am excited for everybody to see that."

How long before the sex tape on those two comes out? 

What's the over/under on that?

What China is buying

Click for the 13-F of China Investment Corp.

The full Favre interview

Greek rescue rumor on deck?

Even the FT can't contain its sarcasm. Maybe it's because the whole world is betting against the euro, and the hedge fund boys want the euro down.

Which means its time for those bets to start unraveling.

Dow below 10,000! Europe on the fiscal precipice! Never fear, Jean-Claude is coming.

The euro rallied, commodities perked up and global stocks recovered their poise after it emerged that Jean-Claude Trichet, European Central Bank president, was to leave a summit with his peers in Australia early and fly to the rescue of the eurozone.

Mr Trichet’s attendance at Thursday’s special meeting of European leaders, called to address the region’s economy, was seen as evidence that a deal to support Greece would be thrashed out.

And Art Cashin's take:

Hark! Do I Hear A Bugle? Is That The Cavalry Coming? – The Euro is rallying this morning and, thus, so are U.S. stock futures. The catalyst appears to be an announcement that ECB President, Jean-Claude Trichet, is leaving a meeting in Sydney early to return to Europe. The presumption is that he is returning to help set up some kind of rescue package for Greece. Since it’s a long plane ride, we don’t expect any hard news soon. That could keep the rumor alive.

Swimsuit Issue

Goldman Sachs helped Greece understate its debt with cross currency swaps

Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit.

Greece's debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period -- to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.

But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks.

This credit disguised as a swap didn't show up in the Greek debt statistics. Eurostat's reporting rules don't comprehensively record transactions involving financial derivatives. "The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps," says a German derivatives dealer.
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Maybe that's why their are rumors that Goldman has all the credit default swaps on Greece's debt.

They helped them hide it!

"Miss Me Yet?"

I-35 near Wyoming, Minnesota.

AIG is still in the business of Deny, Deny, Deny

Unless of course, they're paying out billions and billions and billions to Goldman Sachs. Then they just bend over because its the taxpayer's money!

Trudy Barnes, a 31-year-old mother of three, suffered from curvature of the spine and sought to have it corrected in February 2007 at a suburban Dallas hospital. During the surgery an anesthesiologist inserted a catheter too far into her chest, puncturing a vein and causing heavy bleeding. She went into cardiac arrest and died two days later.

Trudy had $149,000 worth of life insurance through an employee plan at defense contractor L-3 Communications, where her husband, Clint, worked. The insurer was American International Group. After Trudy died, Clint submitted a claim for accidental death benefits.

AIG denied the claim, saying Trudy had had an uncommonly bad reaction to a known complication of surgery. "This is an accident-only policy and does not cover sickness or disease," a letter from the company stated.

In his Feb. 4 ruling in favor of Barnes, Judge Chin stressed that Trudy's death was not caused by her back problems. "[The misplacement of the catheter] was not supposed to happen," Chin wrote. "Rather it was an unintentional, unexpected, unusual and unforeseen event--an accident. AIG's determination to the contrary must be set aside as arbitrary and capricious."

And now we see Goldman Sachs, is gaming the CDS game on Greece, just like they did to AIG.

ZH
If Greek banks, as the rumors goes, indeed sold Greek protection, and, as the rumor also goes, Goldman was the bulk buyer, either in prop or flow capacity, it is precisely Goldman, just like in the AIG case, that can now dictate what the collateral margin that Greek counterparties, and by extension the very nation of Greece, have to post on billions of dollars of Greek insurance.

The Super Bowl party in DC

A better shot of the Palin Telepalmer

And a better shot of Megan Fox and her thumb double in Super Bowl television yesterday.

Dollar driving today's action

ZH
More dollar carry trade unwinding.

Breakfast with Dave

Great read on  how the banks are stuck with sovereign debt. In other words, if the countries in Europe go bust, the banks books will suck.
Breakfast With Dave February 8, 2010 (David Rosenberg)

Father waterboards her daughter who couldn't recite her ABCs

A U.S. soldier has been accused of "waterboarding" his four-year-old daughter because she would not recite her ABCs.

Joshua Tabor, 27, of Yelm, Wash., allegedly beat the child before holding her head under water Sunday night in the family's kitchen sink, The News Tribune reported.

Tabor reportedly told a police officer that he and his girlfriend "held her down on the counter and submerged her head into the water three or four times until the water came around her forehead and jawline," according to the newspaper.

The suspect said he punished the girl for "refusing to say her letters."

Tabor, a soldier at the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Wash., has been charged with second-degree assault of a child and is set to appear in court Feb. 16.

Sean Payton: The Gambler!!

Who had the balls to go for an onside kick to start the second half!

I don't care how you dress up the way he called the game. He just went for it!

Monday Morning Quarterbacks will tell you that it was well calculated and they were prepared for it--and after the fact, it was a sure bet--but who won't say that after it works?

Because who doesn't prepare or practice for the Super Bowl?

You also need balls.

And he had them!

The Mortgage Bankers Association walks away from a $79 million loan

Don't do as I do, but do as I say. Remember how these shills say it is amoral for a homeowner to walk away from their underwater mortgage? It looks like that is what MBA did.

MBA bought this building for $79 million, and borrowed $75 million to pay for it. They now sold the building for $41.3 million.

The CEO of the trade group, John Courson said, "We're not going to discuss the financing"

Here is what this hypocrite said in an interview a few months ago:

Mr. Courson said he believed under-water mortgage borrowers should keep paying their loans even if that no longer seemed to be in their economic interest. He said paying off a mortgage isn't only a matter of personal interest. Defaults hurt neighborhoods by lowering property values, Mr. Courson said. "What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends?" he asked.
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What about Mr. Courson, the message this says to the world?  How about it? You walk away, but you preach morality when its not your money or the company you head!

How about it PNC? You lent him the money. What type of deal was worked out with your buddy? You just raised $3 billion last Wednesday selling stock to the public.You sold 55 million shares at $54. Now this mortgage is a state secret? If you took a $30 million hickey, its just 1% of the money you raised. So why is it that shareholders aren't entitled to know? They just gave you $3 billion, for gosh sake, and yet you get tell anybody if the head of the MBA walked away from a $30 million hickey, or the type of deal you cut with him?

Why is it that a corporate owner, with hundreds of millions at stake, can just walk away, but a struggling homeowner can't get a loan modification or a break on his mortgage?

Oh that's right. I forgot. Everyday for PNC is just another opportunity to do more to screw Joe SixPack, while you burnish your banker buddies shoes!

China lost 100 tons of poisoned milk powder

SHANGHAI – Chinese authorities say they are trying to track down nearly 100 tons of milk powder tainted with the industrial chemical melamine as the government struggles to prevent a recurrence of the large-scale milk contamination that killed six children and sickened about 300,000 others in 2008.

The hunt for the adulterated milk powder, distributed by a dairy company in the northern region of Ningxia, follows reports of other batches of melamine-tainted products across the country in recent months. The government last week started emergency inspections to get contaminated goods off store shelves.

China's continuing problems with melamine contamination -- more than a year after the toxic chemical first was discovered to be widespread in baby formula and other dairy products -- highlight persistent shortcomings in the government's efforts to ensure the safety of the nation's food supply, despite stricter regulations.
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China executed a couple people last year so they could pretend they got the bad guys that sold poisoned milk.  Meanwhile more toxic milk sits on shelves, and they don't know where it is.

China's keystone cops idea of detective work is to see who dies from dairy products, and then go to the stores they shopped at.

John Thain is hired to run CIT into the ground

John Thain's country home.

John Thain, with the $35,000 commode.

But then again, remember CIT's former chairman, Jeffrey Peek and his wife?

She penned this piece, "Confessions of a TARP Wife"

It wasn’t long ago that America celebrated successful companies and the people who run them. My husband, CEO of one of the biggest TARP recipients, has received more than his share of accolades (in my opinion, well deserved). But because of a few tin-eared nitwits who failed to notice that their industry was under siege, the entire country now thinks that TARP bankers are greedy incompetents dedicated to ripping off taxpayers. Fancy wastebaskets, under-the-rug bonuses, lavish junkets—these are Exhibits A, B, and C in the people’s case against Wall Street. Even the Octomom gets better press....

I’m trying to buck him up and not complicate his life. The last thing he needs is unpleasant publicity, so I’m learning to fly so far below the radar that I have perpetually skinned knees. We’ve picked up new habits, like making donations anonymously and sneaking in late to black-tie galas after society photographer Patrick McMullan has packed up his camera and gone home. We now regularly turn down the invitations we receive from museums and arts organizations that will inevitably be followed by a request for funds. No point in getting their hopes up.

Is it any wonder they hired another prima donna?

The Boost Mobile Shuffle

If you don't remember the Bears shuffle in 1985, you might not get the humor of this. Most young people didn't.

If you did, it was hilarious. "The Who" generation got it.

And Mike Ditka? He picked the Saints.

His track record this year? 16-2!

The Tebow Super Bowl Ad

How about the Tim Tebow ad, that got Gloria Allred all bent out of shape? Remember when she wrote CBS? Warning the world that:

"No sugar coated religiously inspired ad which fails to give all of the relevant facts should be permitted to air on CBS or anywhere else. This is not just another ad. Women's lives are at stake. 

Remember how bent out of shape Planned Parenthood got? How some feminists wanted to boycott the Super Bowl because of it? Because of this?



Someone needs to lighten up!

Girlfriend problems cause Manning to throw game losing interception!

Hah!!!

Why doesn't someone really run with the headline that's right!! About the league "MVP!"

You don't think Peyton was feeling the pressure?? Did anyone see how he looked on the sidelines?

Sitting on the bench--pouting? Worried about a girlfriend story leaking the night before the Super Bowl, instead of winning the game?

Really, Peyton can do whatever he wants in his off time. That's his business. But the distraction sometimes is a variable in performance!

Because after one little rush,  Peyton cracked!

But I don't want to rehash that story, because I don't want to take anything away from the Saints. They kicked their ass!!!
 
They played to win!

They went for it on fourth down at the goal line, and started the second half with an onside kick.

If the Saints didn't recover the kick, we'd hear "Favre" stories about their coaching by the Monday morning quarterbacks.

But you don't hear those stories when you win!

And today, was All Saints Day!

On Super Sunday!

Congratulations Saints and Saint fans!!!!!

You waited 43 years for Super Bowl 44!

And Benny the bookie?

I'll see you Tuesday!

Bring me some green!!!

Who will the Super Bowl MVP thank first?

God: 9/5
Family: 12/1
Teammates: 1/1
Coach: 11/1
Does not Thank Anyone: 2/1

Speaking of God---If the Saints win, does that mean that God no longer "hates" New Orleans after Katrina?

Someone should ask Pat Robertson that!

MVP odds for
Manning 10/17
Brees 43/20

Last year's winner, Santonio Holmes, started his MVP acceptance speech thanking his teammates first, the Lord upstairs second, then the fans, and his family.

National Anthem prop over/under: 1 minute 42 seconds

Sung by Carrie Underwood

The Kim Kardashian over/under props

And it's not her getting over Ray-J by getting under Reggie Bush.

It's how many times CBS will show Kim Kardashian during the Super Bowl.

The line is 2.5.

The over/under line on the Kim Kardashian bust size+hips size vs Total recieving yards + rushing yards by Reggie is 73.

Meanwhile, the person Reggie got under, to get over Kim, Carmen Ortega is now sporting a house tour of Reggie's pad!




Funny how this gets released during Super Bowl week? Even though she doesn't quite look like her photos!













She still wants the over/under to be on her!

Palin's teleprompter--her hand!

Turning gamblers into traders

LAS VEGAS—Investors are sometimes accused of treating the stock market like a casino. Now, one Wall Street firm wants to treat casinos like the stock market.

Bond-trading specialist Cantor Fitzgerald in March took over the management of sports betting at the M Resort, a new 390-room hotel and casino on the Strip's southern edge.

"We wanted to turn gamblers into traders," says Lee Amaitis, the 60-year-old Cantor executive who runs the gambling division, Cantor Gaming.

To do that, the company has transformed Las Vegas sports betting into something it thinks is akin to derivatives trading. By using financial-markets technology, Cantor allows bettors to wager not only on who might win the game or by how much, but also on whether a team can complete its next pass or make a field goal.

While such betting is common in Europe, and has been tried before in Las Vegas, Cantor says it is currently the only company in the U.S. to allow bets while the game is underway. Vegas veterans say Cantor is the first Wall Street trading firm they can remember running a gambling operation here.

The West Wing buried in snow!

And here's how it looked when the snow first started falling!



Finally some shovel-ready jobs!

Weatherman Freaking Out Over DC Snowpocalypse

Who dat with Peyton?

Unnecessary roughness? Wasn't that how the Saints were going to take Peyton out?

How about unsportsmanlike conduct!

Was at a Super Bowl party, and saw tabloid journalism at it's finest.

Peyton's private life is a real Peyton place!

Peyton's downtown apartment?

It's a love shack!

Hush money is being doled out on this story!

Peyton? Who would of thought it?

But unlike Tiger, it ain't with paid girls!