Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker Just some random market thoughts and observations as we head into the holiday weekend doldrums… * The S&P 500 looks to finish the 2nd quarter 2010 down 11%.  An absolute slaughterhouse from the end of April on. * You know the bulls are spent when we couldn’t even get the traditional...

The Market Ticker ADP’s report blew, to be blunt.  +13,0000 private employment, losses in small business (duh.) This was a surprise?  Apparently for the futures it was, as they dove by roughly 8 points in the SPX (0.8%) instantly on release. CNBS has been running nonsense all morning trying to find a silver lining and a way to keep the...

Courtesy of Rick Davis at  Consumer Metrics Institute On June 25th the BEA quietly revised its measurement of GDP growth for the first quarter of 2010 down for the second time, this time to 2.7%. The newly revised growth estimate nearly matches the Consumer Metrics Institute’s original projection for the first quarter, which was 2.62%. The big...

by David Galland, Managing Editor, The Casey Report Scanning through a local newspaper this week, I came across a letter to the editor that speaks volumes about the popular misconceptions that are dragging this country, and the world, to its knees. The letter writer, a retired public school teacher, unleashed a litany of solutions for making...

The Market Ticker Now we’re really in trouble: The ECB failed to auction the €55bn in fixed term deposits it had planned to, and what it did auction (€31.86bn) was at a much-higher rate (0.54 per cent) than what it offered at the start of its Securities Markets Programme (SMP). The market seems to be holding tight to liquidity. The wall...

Tyler Durden HFTs baby. HFTs. They just provide liquidity. Citigroup was trading at $3.81 a share right after 1pm when a “fat finger” or algo came in and took the stock all the way to $3.31. Free E-Mail Trading Course Here

There has been a lot of debate about what the government is doing to stave off a so-called double-dip recession. Some say it will cause runaway inflation; others say...

I don’t see how anyone with any brains could disagree with what Rick Santelli is saying.

by Tyler Durden A week ago, when noting the increasingly weaker results of the ECB’s Term Deposit Operation, better known as liquidity sterilization, we said, to the usual ridicule: “With another auction next week, and then many more, all dependent on the amount of debt that Spain et al place “successfully”, we expect the...

Courtesy of Karl Denninger at The Market Ticker Senator Feingold says: “As I have indicated for some time now, my test for the financial regulatory reform bill is whether it will prevent another crisis.  The conference committee’s proposal fails that test and for that reason I will not vote to advance it.  During debate on the bill,...

Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist John Hussman is officially sounding the double dip siren.  He issued a similar call in November of 2007: Based on evidence that has always and only been observed during or immediately prior to U.S. recessions, the U.S. economy appears headed into a second leg of an unusually challenging downturn. A few...

Tim Iacono The really bad thing about predicting recessions is that it takes the Business Cycle Dating Committee over at the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) many, many months (if not years) to make that final determination – you won’t know whether your guess was good or bad until long after it has lost its relevancy. The Great...

Karl Denninger An amusing piece of mental masturbation from Richmond Fed Economist Kartik Athreya has been making the rounds…. In this essay, I argue that neither non-economist bloggers, nor economists who portray economics — especially macroeconomic policy — as a simple enterprise with clear conclusions, are likely to contibute(sic)...

Vincent Fernando, CFA Personal income rose 0.4% in May vs. 0.5% expected. Personal spending rose 0.2% vs. 0.1% expected. BEA: Personal income increased $53.7 billion, or 0.4 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $49.0 billion, or 0.4 percent, in May, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures...

From Paul Krugman in the NY Times: The Third Depression Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed...