Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:

• Greek Anger Rises as Papandreou Calls for Sacrifices. Prime Minister George Papandreou’s call for Greeks to accept more sacrifices in return for staving off default was rejected by opposition leaders and unions, which are already organizing more protests. Unions representing more than 500,000 civil servants called a 48-hour strike starting May 4. Local government workers called a snap strike for today. Teachers are also on strike from tomorrow and a general strike, the third this year, is planned for May 5. Members of the opposition party Syriza plan to encircle the Finance Ministry in central Athens today. “Protests will increase, given we also have the pension issue before us,” said Spyros Papaspyros, the head of the federation of civil servant unions, ADEDY. “Opting for the easy path of cutting wages and pensions can’t be accepted.”
• Goldman Sachs's(GS) Senior Management Should Be Replaced, Bove Says. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. should replace its top executives because they failed to understand the politics of the financial crisis and mishandled regulators’ claims of fraud against the firm, according to Richard Bove, an analyst at Rochdale Securities. “Goldman is going to have to pay a high price for its ineptitude,” Bove wrote in a note to investors yesterday. “Its shareholders already have.”
• Copper Slumps to Seven-Week Low as China Metal Demand May Slow. Copper dropped to a seven-week low in New York after China ordered banks to set aside more deposits as reserves, fueling concern that the lending curbs by the world’s biggest metals consumer will damp demand. Stockpiles of copper tracked by the Shanghai Futures Exchange increased 0.8 percent to 189,441 metric tons last week, the highest level since at least 2003.
• US. Economy: Manufacturing Expands by Most Since June 2004. Manufacturing in the U.S. expanded in April at the fastest pace since June 2004, indicating the world’s largest economy accelerated as it entered the second quarter. The Institute for Supply Management’s factory index rose to 60.4, exceeding the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of economists, from a March reading of 59.6. Americans’ spending increased in March by the most in five months, according to the Commerce Department.

Wall Street Journal:

• BP(BP) Hopes Relief Well Will Stop Leak.
• Ahmadinejad Slams U.S. Nuclear Policy. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a speech Monday before the U.N., called for a vast remaking of the global institutions guarding the development of nuclear technologies, while denying his nation was seeking atomic weapons. Mr. Ahmadinejad demanded during his 35-minute address that the world's nuclear-weapons states agree to a clear timetable for the disbandment of their the arsenals, as well as to accept an independent body to oversee this process.

CNBC:

• Banks See Weaker Loan Demand: Fed Survey.

NY Times:

• BP(BP) Says Crews Make Progress Stemming Oil Leaks. Bill Salvin, a company spokesman, said that crews had finished building a containment dome, a 4-story, 70-ton structure that the company plans to lower into place over one of the three leaks to catch the escaping oil and allow it to be pumped to the surface. The other two domes would be completed on Tuesday, Mr. Salvin said, and crews hoped to install all three domes by the weekend. “That will essentially eliminate most of the issues you have with oil in the water,” he said. The company was also preparing on Monday to try to install a shutoff valve at the site of one of the three leaks.
• Google(GOOG) Sees a New Role for YouTube: An Outlet for Live Sports.
• How Goldman(GS) Derivatives Amplified Crisis. The Senate investigation into Goldman Sachs offered concrete evidence last week of how defaults on subprime mortgage loans became so costly that they brought the financial system to its knees, The Wall Street Journal reported. After all, even at its height, subprime lending never represented more than a small percentage of the overall mortgage system — something more is needed to explain just why the fall was so drastic when it came. Documents released by the Senate investigation demonstrate that high-risk subprime mortgage bonds were effectively being replicated over and over again in the form of synthetic collateralized debt obligations. In one case, highlighted by The Wall Street Journal, a single $38 million subprime bond found its way into 30 debt pools, resulting in overall losses of $280 million to investors when the bond’s principal was lost. And that is why, in a Senate panel memo last week, Goldman was slammed for the replicating practice, which “magnified the impact of toxic mortgages.”

Business Insider:

• A New Set Of Credit Default Spreads Are Exploding, And For New Reasons.
• Apple(AAPL) On Track For $1 Billion of iPad Revenue in the First Quarter. Apple announced this morning that it sold its 1 millionth iPad last Friday. That is impressive as it sounds, and Apple's iPad is performing ahead of expectations. While there was obviously pent-up demand for the Apple tablet, selling a million of anything in a month -- let alone a $500+ gadget in April -- is an impressive feat.

Zero Hedge:

• Market-Neutral Wipe Out, Likely Next on the Bailout Bandwagon as Liquidity Disappears Again.The Highbridge HSKAX index just suffered its biggest drop since March 2009. Market Neutral players are getting carted out feet first as liquidity is now totally gone and 100k SPY blocks move the market. Nobody but the upward biased and risk-free primary dealers want to participate in this market. MNs are deleveraging massively as the index hits lows not seen since mid-2008.

Weekly Standard:

• American Oligarchy. Don't Expect Real Reform from the Wall Street Democrats. "Now, the Senate Republican leader, he paid a visit to Wall Street a week or two ago,” said President Obama at a California fundraiser for Barbara Boxer in mid-April, putting on a mocking, homespun voice. “He took along the chairman of their campaign committee. He met with some of the movers and shakers up there. I don’t know exactly what was discussed. All I can tell you is when he came back, he promptly announced he would oppose the financial regulatory reform.” To judge from the guffawing that followed, few in attendance realized that Obama is more dependent on “movers and shakers” in the financial sector than any president of our time, although the files of the Federal Election Commission make this clear as day. The movers at Goldman Sachs, whose top employees were grilled before the Senate Banking Committee last week, gave Obama’s party three times as much money in the last cycle ($4.5 million) as they gave to Mitch McConnell’s ($1.5 million). The shakers at Citicorp gave Democrats almost twice as much ($3.1 million) as they gave Republicans ($1.8 million). So every time the president accuses Republicans of trying to “block progress” or of defying “common sense,” as he did that night, he is executing a dangerous tightrope walk. His party’s electoral fortunes depend on his making forceful calls for reform of our banking laws. His party’s fundraising fortunes depend on his ensuring that no serious reform—of the kind that endangers the big banks’ size and power—ever happens. That may be why the Democrats’ strategy of painting the Republicans as obstructionists on finance reform has gained little traction. By the same token, if Republicans ever did get serious about reforming the banks—and even about breaking up an industry that has turned into a Democratic war chest—they would put Democrats in mortal peril.

Rasmussen Reports:

• 55% Rate U.S. Health Care System Good or Excellent, Just 13% Poor. Americans have felt little, if any, impact yet from the newly-passed plan to reform health care, and the majority of U.S. voters continue to give the current system positive ratings. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 55% of Likely Voters rate the current health care system as good or excellent. That’s up from 44% in February and 35% when the President first proposed his reform ideas last May. In July 2008, just 29% rated the health care system as good or excellent. The latest finding includes 17% who rate the current system as excellent. Just 13% of voters currently give the health care system a poor rating, down from 28% two months ago.

Politico:

• Hedge Funds Get 'Free Ride'. Wall Street has taken its lumps in Washington recently and Goldman Sachs has become everyone’s whipping boy, but hedge funds and private equity firms have escaped relatively unscathed. “There’s no question they’ve gotten a free ride,” said Robert Weissman, president of the consumer group Public Citizen. And one reason for that, according to Weissman, is a particularly well-connected group of lobbyists. More than half the 83 lobbyists registered last year to work for the industries’ two trade groups, the Private Equity Council and the Managed Funds Association, have served in government — from Capitol Hill to the Treasury Department. While the revolving door is nothing new, the roster is nonetheless impressive — it has included three former members of Congress (Republican Richard Baker and Democrats Vic Fazio and Martin Frost) and about a half-dozen top staffers with ties to members of the Senate Banking Committee, including its chairman, Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
• N.Y. Lawmakers Blast Ahmadinejad at U.N. Summit. Members of New York's congressional delegation criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence at this week's United Nations nuclear non-proliferation summit as a "sham,” and Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) went one step further, calling for Ahmadinejad’s arrest. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, along with a handful of New York representatives, dismissed Ahmadinejad's speech at the United Nations, while calling for Senate hearings to investigate corporations engaging in business with Iran. “There are no other words to say it: Iran’s presence at this conference is a sham,” Gillibrand said in a release

Reuters:

• Poll Shows Late Surge for Conservatives in Swing Seats. The Conservatives are making a late surge in key swing seats, suggesting it could be on course for a narrow but outright win in Thursday's parliamentary election, a poll published on Monday showed.
• Ford(F) April U.S. Sales Rise 25%. Ford Motor Co posted a 25 percent increase in its April U.S. sales from a year earlier, propelled by record sales of its Fusion midsize sedan and robust demand for trucks led by the F-series pickup.

Independent:

• Britain Faces Years of Austerity, Stephen King Says. After three leadership debates, we may have a better idea of who is likely to win (or, more accurately, who is likely to lose) on 6 May. But what happens thereafter remains a mystery. It's a mystery not so much because the leaders have offered little candour on where the public spending axe will fall. The great British public surely knows by now that the victor in next Thursday's general election will have to give us many spoonfuls of unpleasant medicine to make sure the budgetary figures add up, whether in the form of public-sector pay freezes, job cuts or tax increases (of which higher VAT is surely one of the more obvious candidates).