by Tyler Durden As Obama takes the stage for tomorrow’s State of the Union address, in which, among other things, he probably will not announce that the US debt limit is effectively $16.4 trillion, or 107% of GDP and rising, he faces a very unhappy audience: one which according to Gallup has seen its dissatisfaction with economic and political issues hit record levels. Among the Gallup ob Read More...

 Tyler Durden Submitted by Thomas Gresham of Gresham’s Law, After almost a century of the centrally planned dollar we’re delighted to present a timeline of the most amusingly disturbing speeches delivered by the Federal Reserve & Co. Read More...

Courtesy of StockTiger Sales of existing homes rose to a seasonally adjusted rate of 4.42 million during the final month of the year, marking a 5 percent increase over the downwardly revised 4.39 million homes sold in November and a 4 percent increase over the 4.25 million homes sold in October. The number of homes sold in December 2011 also marked a 3.6 percent increase over the 4.45 million home Read More...

Courtesy of Bruce Krasting  Next Wednesday, between 12:30 and 2PM, we will get a ton of new information to digest and analyze. The Federal Reserve will make a series of statements while unveiling  its new communication effort. A portion of the new information will be contained in the revised Summary of Economic Projections (SEP). The Fed has worked long and hard on its new communication polic Read More...

Gold Stock Trades The end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 greeted investors with spooky market stories to scare investors. A prominent cartoon in the Wall St. Journal depicted a pretty lady shrieking, “The DOW Sank 17%”. Another balloon read “The US Loses Its AAA Rating”. She is screaming, “Who Will Fix Europe?”. Another caption reads, “$71 Billion Yanked From U.S. Stock Mutual Fun Read More...

Courtesy of Mish For weeks we have been hearing “agreement soon” on Greek bond haircuts. The theme for the day today as it was yesterday and as it was a week ago is “tomorrow”. One problem with all of these “deal is close” announcements is none of the have included agreement from those who stand to benefit if there is a credit event. Until those CDS holders are Read More...

by Karl Denninger Bluntly: Look out below. But not necessarily right at this instant. There are firms that are reacting well to earnings.  Intel and IBM to name two.  Then there are those that are doing “not much of anything”, like GE. Then there’s Google, which is getting pounded today after missing on the top line, along with a few others. When I look at the tenor of what&# Read More...

Mario Carias, CFA H/T T3Live Since the start of the earnings season last week, one of the trends continues to be a reduction in the EPS estimates for the last quarter of 2011. The tone set by the banks had slowed down the bullish start to the year in the indexes.  This week has been dominated by how the financial sector reported, mostly mix bag. We also had some of the larger technology stocks su Read More...

Submitted by Tyler Durden One won’t find many orthodox strategists who believe that currency printing, and thus dilution, is favorable for said currency. Yet they do exist (as a reminder, this is precisely what saved the REITs back in early 2009, who came to market with massively dilutive follow on offerings, but the fact that they had market access was enough for investors to buy the stock Read More...

Financial Armageddon  January 18, 2012 Michael Panzner In “On Borrowed Time,” Barron’s columnist Randall Forsyth further undermines the notion that persistent public profligacy can solve our problems: Heavy debt loads slow the U.S. economy now and pose threat to the future. Can a stimulant become a depressant? As with alcohol, government borrowing and spending initially can give a boos Read More...

Fallond Stock Picks Yesterday, semiconductors were stalling out at their 200-day MA; today there was no holding it back. The day started with a gap and didn’t look back. In the process of breaking the 200-day MA it also negated the October and November ‘Bull Traps’. The gain was also accompanied with a ‘Golden Cross’ between 20-day and 50-day MAs. The 5% move in the Read More...

Submitted by Tyler Durden While skimming the latest draft of the “TREATY ON STABILITY, COORDINATION AND GOVERNANCE IN THE ECONOMIC AND MONETARY UNION” or the EU fiscal draft in short, which is supposed to give Europe reason to rejoice as it says something about the ESM potentially being levered more than €500 billion (not absent additional funding of course, and we have seen how goo Read More...

By Marin Katusa, Casey Research To many walking the planet, fracking has a seriously bad reputation. Thanks to hyperbole and misinformation, fracking opponents have convinced a lot of people that the operators who drill and then hydraulically fracture underground rock layers thumb their noses at and even hate the environment. Anti-fracking claims may be twists on reality – for example, that a l Read More...

Courtesy of Joshua M. Brown, The Reformed Broker Why do the Big Six media companies want SOPA to be so punitive toward web companies like Google who are clearly not in favor of copyright violation themselves?  What if I told you that it has as much to do with “protecting the pipe” as it does protecting the content itself? It turns out that almost all of the content owners have more t Read More...

Ever since the end of World War Two, the U.S. has come to regard Saudi Arabia as almost its exclusive oil producing enclave. In February 1945, after the Yalta Conference with Soviet General Secretary Iosif Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on his way home U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud met aboard the New Orleans-class heavy cruiser U.S.S. Quincy in th Read More...