Weekend Headlines
Bloomberg:
- Even if Democrats lose the Jan. 19 special election to pick a new Massachusetts senator, Congress may still pass a health-care overhaul by using a process called reconciliation, a top House Democrat said. That procedure requires 51 votes rather than the 60 needed to prevent Republicans from blocking votes on President Barack Obama’s top legislative priorities. That supermajority is at risk as the Massachusetts race has tightened. “Even before Massachusetts and that race was on the radar screen, we prepared for the process of using reconciliation,” said Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Getting health-care reform passed is important,” Van Hollen said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “Reconciliation is an option.” The procedure is designed to make deficit-cutting easier by reducing the number of votes needed to pass unpopular tax increases and spending cuts. Lawmakers can’t include policy changes that the parliamentarian deems have only an “incidental” connection to budget-cutting, and senators would need 60 votes to override those rulings.
- Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has been asked to join his successor Timothy Geithner in testifying before a House panel examining bailout payments to American International Group Inc.’s trading partners. Paulson was invited to a Jan. 27 hearing set by Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, about the decision to fully reimburse AIG’s bank counterparties for $62.1 billion in derivatives. Stephen Friedman, the former Federal Reserve Bank of New York chairman who serves on the board of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.(GS), was also asked to appear, Towns said in a statement yesterday. The request widens the probe into what lawmakers have called a “backdoor bailout” of banks that benefited from the $182.3 billion U.S. rescue of AIG. Geithner, who ran the New York Fed when AIG was saved in 2008, agreed to testify before the committee after Darrell Issa, a California Republican, released e-mails last week showing that the New York Fed asked AIG to withhold data about bank payments. The Federal Reserve and Treasury should be subpoenaed for documents tied to the rescue and attempts at limiting disclosure, Issa said yesterday in a letter to Towns. Towns subpoenaed the New York Fed this week for Geithner’s AIG-related e-mails and phone logs after Issa, the ranking Republican on the oversight committee, called for the documents. Geithner decided to pay AIG’s counterparties for the full value of the underlying assets tied to credit-default swaps even though the bonds had declined in value, according to a November report by Neil Barofsky, the special inspector charged with policing the U.S. Troubled Asset Relief Program. The insurer’s rescue “provided AIG’s counterparties with tens of billions of dollars they likely would have not otherwise received,” Barofsky wrote.
- China will "appropriately control excessive" capital inflows and continue with a crackdown on illegal fund inflows, a State Administration of Foreign Exchange official said. China has to strengthen capital controls in order to maintain currency and price stability, Guan Tao, head of the currency regulator's international payments department, said during a forum in Beijing yesterday, citing economic theories.
- Corn and soybeans may fall on reduced investment demand after the U.S. government predicted that record global production will boost inventories to a nine- year high in 2010. Nineteen of 33 traders and analysts surveyed on Jan. 15 from Tokyo to Chicago said corn will decline, and 22 of 35 respondents said soybeans would fall. Last week, corn futures plunged 12 percent to $3.715 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, the biggest drop in 13 months. Soybeans slumped 4.7 percent to $9.74 a bushel.
- Tyco International Ltd.(TYC), the world’s largest maker of security systems through its ADT unit, agreed to buy Brink’s Home Security Holdings Inc. in a cash and stock transaction valued at $2 billion. Brink’s shareholders can choose to receive $42.50 in cash, Tyco shares or a combination of cash and stock, Schaffhausen, Switzerland-based Tyco said today in a statement. The transaction has been approved by the boards of both companies, Tyco said.
- Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the model for Islamic political movements across the Middle East, named Mohammed Badie, who analysts say opposes openness in the 81 year-old organization, as its new leader. The Brotherhood formally announced Badie’s election along with 16 members of its policy-setting Guidance Bureau today in Cairo. Former member Abdel Moneim Abul Futouh and ex-deputy leader Mohammed Habib, both of whom had campaigned for the Brotherhood to take an active role with other opposition groups in favor of democracy, were missing from the list. “It is a confirmation of the old guard,” said Diaa Rashwan, a researcher of Islamic political movements at the Al- Ahram Center for Political and Security Studies in Cairo. “It’s a coup against reformists who wanted more openness and to link with other democracy activists.” The Brotherhood has ties with Hamas, the Islamic party and militia that governs the Gaza Strip, along with affiliates in Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Kuwait, Sudan and in Europe. In a letter published today on the brotherhood’s Web site, Badie criticized a “global system” led by the U.S., which uses its “economic power to assert its control over our countries.” He also attacked Israel. “The Zionist state seeks the abolition and cancellation of our values, cultures and Islamic identity for its western values, which seeks the destruction of our faith and morals in our countries,” he wrote. Badie is a veterinarian who was a disciple of the late Sayyid Qutb, a prominent Brotherhood propagandist. Qutb wrote that the West was infected with destructive materialist values and that Islamic societies had failed to submit properly to God’s authority. Qutb inspired al-Qaeda, the global terror network and its founder, Osama bin Laden, according to James F. Rinehart, a political science professor at Alabama’s Troy University in a 2006 paper titled “The Millenarian Ideology of al-Qaeda.” In 1996, Qutb was executed for allegedly plotting to kill than- Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.
- Iceland’s credit risk may rise “considerably” as the island faces the threat of a shelved emergency bailout and a government collapse, Standard & Poor’s said. “The risk is there that the program will fall apart and with that, the downside risks would increase very considerably,” Moritz Kraemer, S&P’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said in a Jan. 15 telephone interview. If the outlook for the bailout program doesn’t improve, “it’s quite possible” the government will collapse.
- Google Inc.(GOOG) said it has begun talks with the Chinese government about the company’s plan to stop censoring results from its search engine, after threatening to quit the country because of cyber attacks. Google will hold more talks with Chinese authorities “in the coming days,” it said in an e-mailed statement today.
Wall Street Journal:
- One week after an earthquake pulverized Haiti, emergency supplies of water, food and medicine are beginning to reach large numbers of the country's desperate survivors. The number of U.S. troops in Haiti is expected to reach about 10,000 by midweek to help transport emergency supplies, provide security and clear debris. In the interim, however, residents have perished as distraught relatives awaited rescue teams and equipment that didn't arrive in time. Homeless people still camp on the streets, wondering why aid is taking so long. "They say there's help, but it doesn't arrive," said Henock Volmidor, an unemployed hotel worker, at a makeshift refugee camp on Monday. It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 that killed at least 230,000 people in 13 countries, the United Nations and emergency-relief organizations vowed to avert the disorganization that plagued that effort.
- Thousands of homeowners participating in the Obama administration's foreclosure-prevention plan could miss a government deadline for completing necessary paperwork, putting them at risk of disqualification. The program, a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's housing-rescue effort, was launched in February and has been bedeviled by paperwork problems from the start. Many companies have given borrowers modified mortgage terms on a trial basis, based on verbal information, and have struggled to get the documents required to finalize mortgage modifications. According to data released by the Treasury Department Friday, more than 900,000 borrowers have begun trial modifications under the program, but just 7% of them have received permanent changes so far.
- Climate-Change on Glaciers Under Fire. An influential United Nations panel is facing growing criticism about its practices after acknowledging doubts about a 2007 statement that Himalayan glaciers were retreating faster than those anywhere else and would entirely disappear by 2035, if not sooner. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said Monday that the U.N. body was studying how the 2007 report "derived" the information about glacier retreat, according to a spokesman at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, where Dr. Pachauri is the director. "The IPCC report said Himalayan glaciers are receding faster than anywhere else in the world and that's not correct," said J. Graham Cogley, a professor of geography at Trent University in Ontario. Dr. Cogley is a glaciologist who contributed to another part of the 2007 IPCC report and is one of the first people to track down some of the inconsistencies in the section on Himalayan glaciers. He added that the 2035 date was also likely wrong. "There's a failure to review this data adequately by qualified experts," Prof. Cogley said.
- A Pentagon review panel urged the military to consider penalizing several officers for failing to adequately supervise Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, last fall. The review also concluded that the military didn't devote sufficient attention to the problem of soldiers who adopt radical religious or political views. Maj. Hasan, who was shot and paralyzed during the incident, remains in treatment at a Texas Army hospital. He pleaded not guilty to 13 charges of murder and 32 charges of attempted murder. The military has assembled a so-called sanity board to assess Maj. Hasan's mental condition. But his attorney, John P. Galligan, said he doubts military mental-health professionals could render a fair judgment of one of their own, at a time when top Pentagon officials are blaming military doctors for missing warning signs in Maj. Hasan. The panel's report was sharply critical of the military's ability to combat terrorist threats from within. "The report raises serious questions about the degree to which the entire Department of Defense is prepared for similar incidents in the future, especially multiple simultaneous incidents," Mr. Gates said. Among other things, they recommended that commanders be given more authority to probe service members' outside activities that might signal political or religious radicalization. The review didn't specify, though, how commanders should keep tabs on messages being delivered at mosques or churches. The review also warned that radical groups may use their status as religious organizations to get allies into the military's chaplain programs. It didn't cite any examples of that happening. The military has limited authority to reject such groups as "ecclesiastical endorsers," which "could allow undue improper influence by individuals with a propensity toward violence," the review said.
Intrade.com:
MarketWatch.com:
Business Insider:
- Credit Suisse sees far too many reasons to short the yen these days, in a global equity strategy report from January 11th. First of all, they find the Yen nearly 25% over-valued on purchasing-power-parity basis (PPP) vs. the U.S. dollar. Secondly, they point to Japan's even more rapidly deteriorating government debt situation. Thirdly, they highlight recent political pressures to weaken the yen in a bid to help exports. It would also be a 'stealth default' on government debt obligations. Then fourthly, they show the chart below. The credit default swap (CDS) market has lost a lot of confidence in Japan. Note how the credit default swap spread for Japanese sovereign debt has doubled since mid-2009, meaning the cost to insure Japanese government debt against potential default has soared.
NY Times:
- Worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday, President Obama met on Dec. 22 with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them. In a separate White House meeting that day, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day. Yet in those sessions, government officials never considered or connected links that, with the benefit of hindsight, now seem so evident and indicated that the gathering threat in Yemen would reach into the United States. Just as lower-level counterterrorism analysts failed to stitch together the pieces of information that would have alerted them to the possibility of a suicide bomber aboard a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas, top national security officials failed to fully appreciate mounting evidence of the dangers beyond the Arabian Peninsula posed by extremists linked to Yemen. Mr. Obama this month presented his government’s findings on how the plot went undetected. But a detailed review of the episode by The New York Times, including more than two dozen interviews with White House and American intelligence officials and with counterterrorism officials in Europe and Yemen, shows that there were far more warning signs than the administration has acknowledged. The officials also cited lapses and misjudgments that were not disclosed in the declassified government report released Jan. 7 about what went wrong inside the nation’s counterterrorism network.
- Investors in technology start-ups have been trying to end the drought in initial public offerings of tech companies. But for entrepreneurs, has taking a company public lost its allure? That question is growing louder among those who start, invest in and advise Silicon Valley start-ups. “I.P.O. has become a bad word in the Valley,” said Richard Barton, a founder and the chief executive of Zillow.com, a real estate site, and a venture partner at Benchmark Capital. When start-ups grow up, the founders pay back their investors by selling the business to a bigger company or selling shares to the public. Public offerings have long been the more desirable option. They earn the founders and investors more money and the promise of continuing returns, and enable them to keep expanding the company. Still, in a survey of start-ups by the venture capital firm DCM, only 19 percent said they expected to go public. Three-quarters said a major barrier was stricter regulations for public companies. “People don’t want to run public companies anymore because they don’t want to get dragged through the mud,” said Rob Coneybeer, a managing director at the investment firm Shasta Ventures. “They’re so focused on paperwork that they can’t focus on building a business.” In the last two years, only 18 tech start-ups have gone public, compared with 143 in the two years prior. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which tightened corporate governance and accounting rules, has taken a lot of the blame.
- Xbox Takes On Cable, Streaming TV Shows and Movies.
NY Post:
- Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula issued fresh threats Monday against the U.S. and its Mideast allies, promising to retaliate against a surge of strikes launched in the past month against its leaders and safe havens in Yemen. The terrorist group also denied statements made by Yemeni authorities late last week that six of al Qaeda's senior leaders in the country, including the man identified as the leader of the group's military operations, had been killed in an air strike.
- China plans to pull “Avatar” from most cinemas, despite the long lines for tickets, to make way for a more patriotic film the censors deem more appropriate -- a biography of Confucius, the Times of London reported Monday. The move comes amid government anxiety that many Chinese are making a link between the plight of the film's Na’vi, who face being displaced from their homeland, and that of those in China who are subject to often brutal evictions by property developers. Hong Kong’s Apple Daily said the state-run China Film Group had instructed cinemas nationwide to stop showing the 2D version of “Avatar” from January 23 on orders from Beijing’s propaganda czars. The newspaper said, “Reportedly, the authorities have two reasons for this check on ‘Avatar’: First, it has taken in too much money and has seized market share from domestic films, and second, it may lead audiences to think about forced removal, and may possibly incite violence.”
Orlando Sentinel:
- The Walt Disney Co.’s(DIS) theme-park division is quietly working on a major technology initiative that boosters hope could radically transform the theme-park experience. Details of the project, which has been dubbed within Walt Disney Parks and Resorts as “next generation experience” or “NextGen,” are being closely guarded. But there is widespread speculation among former Disney executives and bloggers who follow the company that at least part of the project involves wireless-communication technology that could be used in concepts ranging from keyless hotel-room doors to rides and shows in which the experience varies based on an individual guest’s preferences.
Washington Times:
Politico:
- A new InsiderAdvantage poll conducted exclusively for POLITICO shows Republican Scott Brown holding a 9-point advantage over Martha Coakley a day before Massachusetts voters trek to the ballot box to choose a new senator. According to the survey conducted Sunday evening by the non-partisan firm, Brown leads the Democratic attorney general 52 percent to 43 percent. The results came as Suffolk University in Boston released a survey Monday reporting that Brown surged to a double-digit lead in three Massachusetts communities identified as bellwethers because party registration in those cities is similar to the statewide voter makeup and because in the most recent “like election” – the November 2006 Senate race– the results in all three communities were within 1 percentage point of the actual statewide results for each candidate. "I actually think the bottom is falling out," said InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery, referring to Coakley's fall in the polls over the last ten days. "I think that this candidate is in freefall. Clearly this race is imploding for her."
- President Barack Obama plans a combative response if, as White House aides fear, Democrats lose Tuesday’s special Senate election in Massachusetts, close advisers say. “This is not a moment that causes the president or anybody who works for him to express any doubt,” a senior administration official said. “It more reinforces the conviction to fight hard.” A defeat by Martha Coakley for the seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy would be embarrassing for the party — and potentially debilitating, since Democrats will lose their filibuster-proof, 60-vote hold on the Senate. A potential casualty: the health care bill that was to be the crowning achievement of the president’s first year in office. The health care backdrop has given the White House a strong incentive to strike a defiant posture, at least rhetorically, in response to what would be an undeniable embarrassment for the president and his party.
Rasmussen Reports:
- Like fans cheering for their favorite football teams, voters nationwide are paying attention to the special U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts. Almost half of them are rooting for Republican candidate Scott Brown over his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 49% of likely voters nationwide want Brown to win, while 34% are cheering on Coakley.
LA Times:
- Private investment funds paid more than $125 million to scores of intermediaries who helped them win business with the California Public Employees' Retirement System, new documents show, prompting calls for stronger oversight of those who solicit public pension money. The intermediaries, or placement agents, include three former CalPERS board members -- one of them William D. Crist, a longtime board president -- who lobbied the pension fund on behalf of an investment firm seeking a share of CalPERS' $205 billion in assets. Pension experts say the disclosures are troubling, as lobbying by former board members could put pressure on CalPERS to put money with investment firms that charge excessive fees or that don't offer the best returns.
Boston Herald:
zerohedge:
EIA:
- OPEC Surplus Capacity and Crude Oil Prices.
NetworkComputing:
- A new report from CDW, suggests that the best days of virtualization are still ahead of us. The report found technical concerns are constraining virtualization adoption at many businesses. A whopping 90 percent of organizations implemented server virtualization at some level; more than half (54 percent) said they had completed their deployments. However, even "fully deployed" organizations report that only 37 percent of their infrastructure consists of virtual servers. What's more most organizations believe they have the necessary policies and staff in place for a successful implementation.
USAToday:
OpenSecrets.org:
Reuters:
- Goldman Sachs (GS) has postponed the expected announcement of its annual bonus pool to staff in London, the Daily Telegraph reported in its Tuesday edition. The paper said the bank had been due to make the announcement on Monday but told the staff it had been delayed until possibly the end of the month. It said staff were not given an explanation for the decision but quoted a bank "insider" as saying London's Financial Services Authority watchdog had taken issue with Goldman's bonus arrangements, effectively blocking the plans.
Financial Times:
- China's going the way of Spain, Ireland and Japan. It is the fastest-growing consumer of luxury goods in the world. It will have an economy bigger than the US by 2027 (or maybe 2030, depending on who you listen to). It has 70 big cities, all crammed with new-build apartment blocks. It is home to the world’s largest dam. It buys more cars than America and produces half the world’s steel. It has grown somewhere between 8 and 10 per cent every year for decades and can keep doing so. It is the world’s second-largest consumer of energy. It produces 60 per cent of the world’s buttons in just one of its towns. It has a huge population with a growing middle class poised to gobble up every consumer good in sight. Yes, it’s China – the world’s current miracle economy, the country that will dominate the decade, and the best possible home for your savings during that decade. That, at least, is the hype. But how much of it stands up to scrutiny? At the end of last year, I wrote here that while I agreed with much of the China story, I wouldn’t touch its markets because they were far too expensive. But having looked at things in more depth, I’m beginning to doubt the status of the economic miracle itself. Why? Because, right now, it rests on about the most unstable of foundations there is: rampant credit growth. China has been growing fast – at around 10 per cent a year – for about 30 years. That, says a note from Pivot Asset Management, combined with the fact that the growth has mostly been investment led, means that, “both in its duration and intensity”, China’s capital spending boom has now outstripped all other “previous great transformation periods”, such as those of postwar Japan and Germany. The point? That China’s growth cycle is more mature than emerging: it has most of the infrastructure it needs already, and so should be slowing rather than accelerating its capital spending. When you look at where capital spending is now going, that makes sense. On YouTube, you will find an amazing film of the city of Ordos. It is newly built and could be home to 1m people. Instead, it’s empty. With prices rising 50-60 per cent a year in some areas, its houses have been bought by investors expecting to make a turn without having to bother with pesky tenants. Think Manchester 2006. And it isn’t just residential cities that are empty. China now has more ports, offices, airports and steel factories than it will know what to do with for many years to come. Commercial property vacancy rates in central Shanghai are said to be as high as 50 per cent. Yet far from pulling back on building, the Chinese are pushing on at speed. In the first three quarters of 2009, China’s industrial capacity expanded at more than 25 per cent. So what’s going on? It’s all about the global credit bubble. China’s response has been to try to keep its famous growth rate going (and head off social unrest and so on in the process) by replacing export demand with state-sponsored demand – $586bn worth of it in direct spending and many billions more in unfettered bank lending. The result? Its very own credit bubble. Today, far from being the miracle economy of the popular imagination, China looks to be caught in a nasty trap of artificial and unsustainable growth driven by rapid credit growth and bubble psychology (everyone thinks the authorities can and will stop asset prices falling). In the first five working days of January alone, China’s commercial banks are said to have lent out the equivalent of more than $50bn. Not good.
- US investors who are continuing to shun US equity markets in favour of bond investments or emerging market stocks may be in for disappointment, according to the chief investment officer at T Rowe Price. With interest rate rises looming – which could dent the value of fixed income investments such as corporate bonds – and with emerging market stocks having gained so quickly in the past year, Brian Rogers, chairman and chief investment officer at T Rowe Price, said investors should “fight that tendency to follow the herd”. “Whenever market rebounds are as strong as we saw in much of 2009 in categories like emerging market equities, high-yield bonds, precious metals – you always begin to wonder whether or not investors understand the risk and return balance involved,” he said, adding that he would “tilt away” from those sectors. According to the latest data from EPFR Global, which tracks fund flows and asset allocation, bond funds for the week ending January 6 had net inflows of $3bn. Developed market equity funds had outflows of $4.3bn, with emerging market equity funds taking in $2.2bn for the week. The one shift from last year – which echoes Mr Rogers’ concerns about price moves – is that inflows into commodity sector funds appear to have stopped. “Commodity sector funds, which absorbed a record-setting $17bn in 2009, stumbled into the New Year as investors pulled $422m out of this fund group,” EPFR said.
- Marshall Wace, one of Europe’s largest hedge funds, will on Monday unveil plans to launch a publicly listed exchange-traded fund to track its flagship Tops fund strategy in an effort to rebuild assets after huge redemptions in 2009. The move marks a rekindling of a trend popular among top-tier hedge funds at the height of the boom to list versions of their restricted, proprietary strategies on stock exchanges.
- The team responsible for these finger-in-the-air growth estimates has it easy compared with those charged with the far more political topic of calculating the number of “created and saved” jobs due to government stimulus. The answer, a supposed 1.5 to 2m boost to employment, will earn the CEA a grateful tick from the Obama administration. But the numbers are almost meaningless. Recipients of funds were asked to guess how many workers would have been lost had they not been helped out – an impossible thing to know. This approach is being simplified. Now, anyone working on a project funded by stimulus money will be counted as “created and saved”, even if they were never going to lose their job. That will boost the numbers, but so would the government simply hiring every person that walks in off the street. The truth is that creating jobs per se makes as much sense as it did in communist Russia. Obama is right to want every stimulus dollar accounted for. But after spending it, he just has to let the economy run its course.
TimesOnline:
- THE UK’s third-largest hedge fund, Bluecrest, will move 50 of its highest-earning traders and fund managers to its new office in Geneva before the 50% income tax on high-earners kicks in on April 6. The hedge fund, currently housed in an office overlooking London’s Buckingham Palace Gardens, is the first sizeable business — with $16.7 billion (£10 billion) under management — to move part of its operations to the Swiss canton. The departure marks the beginning of an exodus of this highly mobile industry from Britain — a reaction to higher taxes and the threat of a new regulatory regime governing hedge funds from the European Union. A number of smaller hedge funds, including Amplitude Capital, have already relocated to low-tax jurisdictions. In Switzerland the income tax rate is closer to 25%.
Telegraph:
- Britain has the greatest number of Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaeda of any Western country and poses a grave risk to international security, the US government believes. Terrorist groups are using the UK as a base to plot terrorism attacks around the world, American officials have disclosed. The level of al-Qaeda activity in the UK is a “major source of concern” in Washington. American leaders believe Gordon Brown's government is failing to combat the threat of extremism among Muslims living in Britain. “The UK has the greatest concentration of active al-Qaeda supporters of any Western country,” a senior US official told the Daily Telegraph. “As a result, no Western country has been more threatened than the UK, but the UK-based al-Qaeda network poses not only a potent threat to Britain but to the rest of the world.” The disclosure of American fears will increase Transatlantic tensions over the attempted terrorist attack on an airliner over Detroit last month.
- CFTC's saber-rattling fails to tackle the over-the-counter commodities market. Regulators and traders have been stuck on an endless merry-go-round of exploding bubbles and crackdowns in the commodities market for the past 30 years, heading inevitably towards the recent backlash against oil price spikes.
SonntagsZeitung:
- UBS AG is seeking to pay employees about $3.9 billion in bonuses.
Nikkei:
- Toyota Motor Corp. plans to double hybrid production to 900,000 in 2011 from 2009. Production will rise to 1.1 million the following year, the company told parts suppliers.
Hong Kong Economic Journal:
- China may introduce more macro-control measures, including raising interest rates, to cool economic growth this year, citing the head of a research group. The Chinese government may take new measures to curb growth if inflation exceeds the targeted 4% this year, citing Wang Zhenzhong, a deputy-director at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Xinhua:
- China's southern island province of Hainan will suspend land leasing and development approval in a move to curb property speculation, the province's Party chief has said. Following a tourism promotion policy document issued by the central government earlier this month, real estate developers have flocked into the island, causing new property bubble concerns, WeiLiucheng, secretary of the Communist Party of China Hainan provincial committee, said at a meeting in Haikou Friday.
Weekend Recommendations
Barron's:
- Made positive comments on (NFG), (LM), (OIH), (IMAX), (VPRT), (LIOX), (CB), (KFT), (NAT) and (MICC).
Citigroup:
- Reiterated Buy on (MMM), target $92.
- Reiterated Buy on (VECO), raised estimates, boosted target to $44, added to Top Picks Live list.
Night Trading
Asian indices are -.75% to +.25% on avg.
S&P 500 futures +.26%.
NASDAQ 100 futures +.48%.
Morning Preview
BNO Breaking Global News of Note
Yahoo Most Popular Biz Stories
MarketWatch Pre-market Commentary
US AM Market Call
NASDAQ 100 Pre-Market Indicator/Heat Map
Pre-market Stock Quote/Chart
WSJ Intl Markets Performance
Commodity Futures
IBD New America
Economic Preview/Calendar
Earnings Calendar
Who’s Speaking?
Upgrades/Downgrades
Politico Headlines
Rasmussen Reports Polling
Earnings of Note
Company/Estimate
- (FRX)/.86
- (PH)/.34
- (SCHW)/.15
- (FAST)/.31
- (C)/-.30
- (CREE)/.29
- (IBM)/3.47
- (CSX)/.76
- (AMTD)/.26
Upcoming Splits
- None of note
Economic Releases
9:00 am EST
- Net Long-term TIC Flows for November are estimated at $27.5B versus $20.7B in October.
1:00 pm EST
- The NAHB Housing Market Index for January is estimated to rise to 17.0 versus 16.0 in December.
Other Potential Market Movers
- The BoC Rate decision, weekly retail sales reports, ABC consumer confidence reading and the (NAV) analyst day could also impact trading today.
BOTTOM LINE: Asian indices are mostly lower, weighed down by financial and manufacturing stocks in the region. I expect US stocks to open modestly higher and to weaken into the afternoon, finishing mixed. The Portfolio is 75% net long heading into the week.
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