Swine flu update, courtesy of TIME By AP / PHILIP ELLIOTT President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency and empowered his health secretary to suspend federal requirements and speed treatment for thousands of infected people. The declaration that Obama signed late Friday authorized Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen...

MISH Citigroup is in serious trouble. It’s easy to tell by what they are doing. Inquiring minds note that Citi Abruptly Shutting Down Gas-Linked Credit Cards. Citi (C) is abruptly shutting down credit cards linked to gas station partners. The bank is offering few details: The bank said in a statement it “decided to close a limited number...

Great interview with Art Cashin, a UBS floor trader on the NYSE for nearly 50 years, shares his insights with Bob Pisani. Hat Tip to Trading Wall Street Investments

The Mad Hedge Fun Trader Featured Trades: (AGU), (POT), (MON), (DBA), (CAT), (JON STEWART) 1)With December wheat (WZ09) tickling $5.48 yesterday, the e-mails are now pouring in from farmers, co-ops, and silo managers in the Great Plains states offering reasons why it should go higher. The Northern states and much of the Midwest west have now endured...

Lawrence Delevingne of Business Insider Think commodities and emerging markets, and don’t expect even high single digit portfolio returns. That was the grim message today at the Forum for Institutional Investors conference, where a panel of private equity managers on macro economics. Here are some highlights from our notes on the discussion. ON...

By Terry Coxon, Editor, The Casey Report Most of us are gathered at the station, watching for the Inflation Express to come rumbling in. But we’ve been waiting for a while now. Just when should we expect the big locomotive to arrive and start pushing the prices of most things uphill? We’d all like to know the exact date, of course, but no one...

Zero Hedge writes: Today’s market action has been essentially one-way wholesale selling of every dollar-denominated asset class (except allegedly Kindles, which are now accepted as Fed discount window collateral (until HR 1207 passes we won’t really know), and are rumored to soon have a direct brokerage feed allowing readers to buy (but...

Courtesy of Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns The positive earnings announcement by Wells Fargo on Wednesday was marred by a sell recommendation from Dick Bove and a lot of chatter about credit writedowns and mortgage servicing rights (MSRs). I wanted to add a few words about the report, MSRs, and bank stocks more generally. First of all, this has...

Nouriel Roubini believes that a “wall of liquidity” is chasing all kinds of assets, yet once the economy disappoints expectations, it will all come crashing down. Yet for Dr. Doom, gold isn’t the answer. According to him, despite the temporarily asset bubbles right now, we’re still in a deflationary world and we’ll realize...

From The Business Insider, Microsoft delivered a solid third quarter. The stock is up 7% in the pre-market. EPS of $0.40 fell 17%, but beat Street estimates of $0.32 EPS. Revenue was $12.92 billion, a 14% drop from a year ago, but it beat estimates of $12.32 billion. Microsoft’s web properties continue to sputter. Online services division revenue...

Shares of Amazon.com Inc. surged to a new all-time high Friday after the online retailer reported a 69% jump in third-quarter earnings and a better-than-expected forecast for the current quarter. “While valuation is a concern, we believe Amazon is in too strong a position competitively to continue to stay on the sidelines,” wrote Heath Terry...

Zero Hedge As the only way to make money in this market is to mimic the big boys and to churn stock after stock (especially those with massive short interests) then closing 100% in cash at the end of every day, it was only a matter of time before someone started pitching the very same product that Comedy Central’s Cash Cow highlighted is a sure...

Washington Mutual and JPMorgan are trading barbs in bankruptcy court over $4 billion. Reuters:  Washington Mutual Inc told a federal judge on Thursday that JPMorgan should be forced to return more than $4 billion to the bankrupt holding company, whose bank was seized by regulators and sold to JPMorgan. Washington Mutual Inc attorneys argued in a...

Crude oil was steady to slightly lower overnight as it consolidates some of Wednesday’s rally. Stochastics and the RSI are overbought but are neutral signaling that sideways to higher prices are possible near term. If December extends this month’s rally, weekly resistance crossing at 84.83 is the next upside target. Closes below the 20...

Traders are piling into tech like crazy this morning after blowout numbers from both MIcrosoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN). When was the last time Microsoft was up 10% in a day? That’s a gigantic move for a company with $236 billion market cap. And Amazon is up a staggering 17%. You just don’t see that. It’s early, and the market doesn’t...