by Karl Denninger If this is true, it’s deadly-serious. I have here a record of a note that was open (and unpaid) during a bankruptcy. It was held by one of the big mortgage joints that was swallowed   The debt was not reconfirmed, and it was a second. The first is underwater.  That makes the second uncollectable.  Oh sure, they can sue...

Submitted by RCS Investments The Bull/Bear Weekly Recap Bullish +More signs surface that banks are beginning to loosen lending standards and is a critical element in sustaining and further boosting the economic recovery.  The demand-side is stabilizing as well after quarters of contraction. + Industrial Production shows a healthy rise led by auto...

The Market Ticker So yesterday, depending on exactly who’s numbers you use, we got either a confirmed Hindenburg observation or a “rounded” one. When I checked it earlier in the evening, it was clearly “on.”  The criteria, for those who don’t follow it closely, are: At least 2.2% of the issues traded on the NYSE...

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Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist There is increasing chatter of the great “bond bubble” as U.S. Treasury bonds surge ever higher and deflation fears rise.   This is just one more myth that has persisted in recent years (decades really) due to mass misconception of the way the bond market actually operates and this propensity to label...

Of all the belief systems of Wall Street, few can claim the devoted following of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, the idea that stock prices adhere to the same laws of supply-and-demand that govern retail products. Once coined the theoretical “Parthenon” of economics, this notion...

by Tyler Durden Two days into the proposed Nikkei-SPX convergence, the ROI stands at about 4% after last night’s ramp in the Nikkei and today’s plunge in the S&P. Granted, it is disingenuous to not account for the today’s Nikkei session which is why absent a 4% down day in the Tokyo index, the trade should still be profitable....

CalculatedRisk The Census Bureau released a number of tables from the 2009 American Housing Survey today (report to be released in October). The survey showed: 76.4 million owner occupied housing units in 2009. 24.2 million were owned free and clear (no mortgage). That is 31.7%. 26.8 million primary mortgages were originated in 2004 or earlier. ...

Submitted by Mike Krieger of KAM LP–H/T Zero Hedge When God desires to destroy a thing, he entrusts its destruction to the thing itself.  Every bad institution of this world ends by suicide. All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come. Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters. A creditor is worse...

Courtesy of Yves Smith at Naked Capitalistm A fund manager who will go unnamed mentioned to me that he is putting clients into bank stocks because they are trading at or below book value. Now of course, individual stocks can and do always outperform the outlook for their sector, so there are no doubt particular banks whose stocks are cheap right...

The Mess That Greenspan Made The latest Zillow survey of homeowners reveals that many of them seem to have been reading the newspapers in recent months, aware of the impact that slowing economic growth and the end of the homebuyer tax credit are likely to have on property values. The report notes that 38 percent of homeowners think that their...

By Phil of Phil’s Stock World Today we get another round of Permanent Open Market Operations. POMOs are the Fed’s way of creating additional bank reserves to finance asset purchases and loans for its Primary Dealers (the Gang of 12 or, as David Fry calls them, Da Boyz).   GS and Co. then turn around and use this money to fuel...

by Tyler Durden Summary from the CBO: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed $1.3 trillion—$71 billion below last year’s total and $27 billion lower than the amount that CBO projected in March 2010, when it issued its previous estimate. Relative to the size of the economy, this year’s...

Submitted by Faros Trading What happens when China stops playing the music? (PDF) Attachment Size Attachment Size FarosSpecialReport081910.pdf 95.4 KB

Trading commodities and indexes through the use of exchange traded funds sure keeps things simple for an average trader. These funds allow individual investors to buy and sell things like gold, silver, oil, the sp500 and other investments which where not available only few months ago like “wheat” for example. One of the nice things with ETFs...