Stocks Falling into Final Hour on Rising Long-Term Rates, Financial Sector Pessimism

BOTTOM LINE: The Portfolio is slightly lower into the final hour on losses in my Retail longs and Financial longs. I added to my (IWM)/(QQQQ) hedges this morning and then covered them this afternoon, thus leaving the Portfolio 75% net long. The tone of the market is very negative as the advance/decline line is substantially lower, almost every sector is falling and volume is below average. Investor anxiety is above average. Today’s overall market action is bearish. The VIX is falling rising 7.03% and is very high at 42.45. The ISE Sentiment Index is below average at 122.0 and the total put/call is slightly above average at .94. Finally, the NYSE Arms has been running very high most of the day, hitting 3.88 at its intraday peak, and is currently 1.45. The Euro Financial Sector Credit Default Swap Index is rising 5.39% today to 114.67 basis points. This index is up from a low of 52.66 on May 5^th, but down from 157.81 on Sept. 16^th. The North American Investment Grade Credit Default Swap Index is rising 1.32% to 195.42 basis points. The TED spread is falling 5.21% to 95 basis points. The TED spread is now down 371 basis points in over three months. The 2-year swap spread is rising 8.22% to 59.25 basis points. The Libor-OIS spread is falling 1.25% to 94 basis points. The 10-year TIPS spread, a good gauge of inflation expectations, is up 13 basis points to 1.02%, which is down 168 basis points in over six months. The 10-year TIPS spread bottomed at .65% in October 1998 during the Asian financial crisis and at 1.24% in October 2001 during the technology bubble-bursting meltdown. The 3-month T-Bill is yielding .23%, which is up 5 basis points today. Market-leading stocks are holding up relatively well. “Growth” stocks are again outperforming “value” shares. The AAII % Bulls fell to 25.27%, while the % Bears rose to 47.25% this week. I suspect the rise in gold and the 10-year yield is starting to bother the broad US stock market. Gold is likely rising on European buying as their economies and currency continue to weaken. The 10-year is supposedly falling on supply concerns. Economists expect US 4Q GDP, which is released tomorrow, to fall 5.5%. I suspect the decline in growth won’t be as bad as feared, which could also be pressuring bonds today. I expect the Fed’s quantitative easing initiative to kick into full gear on any meaningful rise in long-term rates from current levels. Volume has been light, with a high NYSE Arms reading, on today’s sell-off, which is a positive. Nikkei futures indicate a -175 open in Japan and DAX futures indicate a -22 open in Germany tomorrow. I expect US stocks to trade modestly lower into the close from current levels on more shorting, financial sector pessimism and rising long-term rates.

Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:

- European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said there’s no risk of Europe’s monetary union falling apart even as bond spreads between member states widen.

- A bill introduced by two senators today would subject hedge funds to regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, a requirement they said is necessary to protect investors and the U.S. financial system. The Hedge Fund Transparency Act, sponsored by Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, and Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, would require hedge funds to register with the SEC, file an annual disclosure form, comply with SEC record-keeping standards and cooperate with SEC investigations.

- Exxon Mobil Corp.(XOM), coming off its worst share drop in 27 years, may be heading for its steepest profit decline since the 1999 merger that created the company. For Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson, it’s time to expand. Tillerson, starting his fourth year leading the world’s largest company by market value, said last month that he may increase capital spending by 20 percent this year to $30 billion. The increase will mark his biggest push to discover oil fields and boost fuel and chemicals production.

- German unemployment rose almost twice as much as forecast in January as an economic slump sparked by the global financial crisis spread to industries from cars to software. The number of people out of work rose by 56,000 in seasonally adjusted terms to 3.27 million, the Nuremberg-based Federal Labor Agency said today. Economists forecast an increase of 30,000, according to the median of 33 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey. The adjusted jobless rate rose to 7.8 percent from 7.7 percent.

- European confidence in the economic outlook fell to the lowest on record in January as the region faces its worst recession since World War II, adding to arguments for the European Central Bank to cut interest rates further. An index of executive and consumer sentiment dropped to 68.9 from a revised 70.4 in December, the European Commission in Brussels said today. That is the lowest since the index was first published in 1985. Euro-area capacity utilization fell to 75.2 percent, the lowest since 1990, in the current quarter, the report showed. A combined 2.25 percentage-point rate cut from the central bank and hundreds of billions of euros in stimulus measures have failed to reverse a slump in confidence, and ECB President Jean- Claude Trichet has signaled another reduction is likely in March.

- Russell Clark, the portfolio manager at Horseman Capital Management LP whose emerging markets fund returned 14.6 percent last year, told clients that emerging- market stocks and bonds are likely to fall in 2009. Low interest rates and stimulus spending will add to excess production capacity, resulting in poor company earnings, Clark said in a letter sent to clients last week.

- The US dollar advanced the most in almost a week against the euro and the yen strengthened as U.S. reports showing durable goods orders dropped and the number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits soared to a record renewed the haven appeal of the currencies.

- The ruble had its biggest two-day drop in a decade against the dollar, less than a week after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin defended Russia’s policy of devaluing the currency “gradually and carefully.” The ruble fell to 34.9835 per dollar, the weakest since January 1998, bringing the two-day decline to 5.5 percent, after the central bank said foreign-exchange reserves fell $9.7 billion last week to $386.5 billion.

- Treasuries tumbled as the government sold a record $30 billion of five-year notes at a higher yield than forecast, indicating weak demand. The auction, which caps a week when the Treasury raised $78 billion in notes and bonds, may signal investors will have trouble absorbing the as-much-as $2.5 trillion in debt the U.S. is likely to issue this year to pay for a $1 trillion budget deficit and programs to spur the economy.

Wall Street Journal:

- The launch of a block-trading venue at the New York Stock Exchange marks the Big Board's latest effort to bring trades back to the exchange, while catering to a growing preference of investors to buy and sell shares without showing their hand or moving the market. Thursday marks the first day of operations at the New York Block Exchange, a joint venture between Big Board owner NYSE Euronext Inc. and BIDS Holdings LP, a trading firm whose owners include large banks and brokerages such as Citigroup Inc., Credit Suisse Group and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

- In the latest sign of how the defense industry expects to resist the economic undertow, General Dynamics Corp.'s(GD) top official said he doesn't see the Obama administration cutting weapons programs that provide lots of manufacturing jobs.

- President Barack Obama's economic-stimulus legislation is headed for the Senate after a surprisingly partisan vote in the House of Representatives in which Republicans united in opposition and 11 mostly conservative Democrats defected.

- Gov. Rod Blagojevich vehemently insisted upon his innocence Thursday to Illinois state senators preparing to kick him out of office, saying, "I have done absolutely nothing wrong."

- U.S. President Barack Obama signed legislation into law Thursday making it easier for employees to sue for wage discrimination, a measure he said is an important step toward "fundamental fairness" for American workers.

CNBC.com:
- Millions of women who get an invasive test for Down Syndrome that carries a risk for miscarriage may soon have a safer alternative, with Harry Stylli, Sequenom(SQNM) CEO and CNBC's Mike Huckman. (video)

Rasmussen Reports:

- Public support for the economic recovery plan crafted by President Obama and congressional Democrats has slipped a bit over the past week. Forty-two percent (42%) of the nation’s likely voters now support the president’s plan, roughly one-third of which is tax cuts with the rest new government spending. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 39% are opposed to it and 19% are undecided.

Washington Post:

- A military judge in Guantanamo Bay has denied the Obama administration's request to delay proceedings for 120 days in the case of a detainee accused of planning the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship, an al-Qaeda strike that killed 17 service members and injured 50 others. The decision throws into some disarray the administration's plan to buy time as it reviews individual detainee cases as part of its plan to close the U.S. military prison at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba. The Pentagon may now be forced to withdraw the charges against Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent. In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors to seek 120-day suspensions of legal proceedings in the cases of 21 detainees who have been charged. There are approximately 245 prisoners held at Guantanamo.

- State regulators urged Congress on Thursday to restore their authority to protect investors from fraud in the banking sector and to beef up oversight of hedge funds. Hedge fund advisers should be subject to the same kind of scrutiny as investment advisers, the North American Securities Administrators Association told reporters. The NASAA said Congress should give the Securities and Exchange Commission explicit authority to regulate the $1.4 trillion industry, which has the potential to destabilize markets.

CNNMoney:

- Glenn Lurie knows Silicon Valley better than most telecom industry types. As AT&T's point man on the iPhone, he was the guy who camped out in Cupertino and hashed out the blockbuster iPhone launch with Apple. The next big game in his sights? The netbook. That's right, the netbook, that shrunken, low-priced laptop that lately has been a rare bright spot in the moribund PC industry. To hear Lurie tell it, AT&T's next hit phone might not be a phone at all, but a netbook with built-in Internet access that works anywhere you can get a cell signal. Get ready for the clincher: Sign up for a two-year contract, and you might get your new PC for $99 or less. The upshot is that the "free phone" phenomenon that helped make handsets ubiquitous in the U.S. isn't just for phones anymore.

Macworld:

- Intel(INTC) plans to detail an eight-core Xeon processor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco next month, offering an early look at what appears to be the company's first eight-core chip.

Der Standard:

- Billionaire investor George Soros said the euro may not survive unless the European Union pushes for a global plan to deal with toxic debt, citing an interview.

Vedomosti:

- Russian rail cargoes may fall 33% in the first half of the year.

recast to "

Herald Sun:
- Google(GOOG) Australia is considering a plan to take on payments giants such as Visa(V), Mastercard(MA) and B-Pay in the booming online payments market. The move comes as the search giant secured a financial services licence from local regulators.

Haaretz:

- In the wake of Operation Cast Lead, a group of American university professors has for the first time launched a national campaign calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. While Israeli academics have grown used to such news from Great Britain, where anti-Israel groups several times attempted to establish academic boycotts, the formation of the United States movement marks the first time that a national academic boycott movement has come out of America. Israeli professors are not sure yet how big of an impact the one-week-old movement will have, but started discussing the significance of and possible counteractions against the campaign.

Bear Radar

Style Underperformer:
Small-cap Value (-4.24%)

Sector Underperformers:
Semis (-7.36%), Homebuilders (-7.08%) and Insurance (-6.56%)

Stocks Falling on Unusual Volume:
AZN, UBS, SRDX, CTXS, PSSI, PLXS, LRCX, WBSN, QCOM, SCHW, OXPS, NSR, RPV, BDK, ZMH, FIC, ALL and ATK

Stocks With Unusual Put Option Activity:
1) TROW 2) SCHW 3) TXT 4) CCL 5) ALL

Bull Radar

Style Outperformer:
Large-cap Growth (-1.18%)

Sector Outperformers:
Education (+2.44%), Airlines (+1.12%) and Disk Drives (+.40%)

Stocks Rising on Unusual Volume:
GFI, SSRI, AEP, CL, CV, CLX, MO, RDS/A, HMY, SEPR, OTEX, LANC, ICLR, OSIS, SBNY, ODFL, SYMC, NFLX, AMLON, COCO, STEL, DDUP, GOLD, MELI, CVD, SYX, ALK, WDC, CAI and NTY

Stocks With Unusual Call Option Activity:
1) TXT 2) BSX 3) ZMH 4) ALL 5) SYMC

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Thursday Watch

Late-Night Headlines
Bloomberg:

- The Japanese yen may weaken against the US dollar and eight more of the world’s most-traded currencies as riskier foreign-exchange trades revive, Citigroup Inc. analysts said, citing technical charts. The US dollar looks to be forming a so-called “double bottom,” meaning any advance above 94.65 yen probably would be followed by a surge to as high as 102 yen, analysts led by NY-based Tom Fitzpatrick, Citigroup’s chief technical analyst, said in a report.

- House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson said a new commodities trading bill he’s circulating in Congress is meant to east price swings that are making it difficult for farmers to manage risk. Corn, wheat and soybeans all reached records last year, prompting investors to pour money into commodity index funds including those managed by Goldman Sachs(GS) and Pacific Investment Management Co., as they sought better returns than stocks and bonds. US trading in the $684 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market would have to be processed by a clearinghouse under Peterson’s draft legislation, potentially costing banks billions of dollars in profit. He said he hopes his colleagues will approve the measure by mid-February. Other details of the measure, including potential position limits on commodities trading, will be worked out at hearings to begin next week, he said. In related comments, the chairman said he’s skeptical that Gary Gensler, President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the CFTC, is the right choice because of his ties to the financial-services industry and concerns that he won’t be a tough regulator. Peterson’s committee oversees the CFTC, which regulates $5 trillion in daily trading. Gensler, 51, was an undersecretary of Treasury during the Clinton administration and worked for 18 years at Goldman Sachs. While at Treasury, he helped develop 2000 legislation that exempted swaps and derivatives trading from regulation by the CFTC.

- A draft bill circulated in Congress that would change how over-the-counter derivatives are regulated might ban most trading in the $29 trillion credit-default swap market. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson of Minnesota unveiled an updated draft bill today that would prohibit credit-default swap trading unless investors owned the underlying bonds. The draft, distributed by e-mail by the committee staff in Washington, would also force U.S. trading in the $684 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market to be processed by a clearinghouse. “This would basically kill the single-name CDS market,” said Tim Backshall, chief strategist at Credit Derivatives Research LLC in Walnut Creek, California. “Given the small size of many issuers’ bonds outstanding, this would make it practically impossible for the CDS market to exist.” As much as 80 percent of the credit-default swap market is traded by investors who don’t own the underlying bonds, according to Eric Dinallo, superintendent of the New York Department of Insurance. As much as 40 percent of profit at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.(GS) and Morgan Stanley(MS) comes from OTC derivatives trading, according to CreditSights Inc. Estimating the new income that exchanges such as CME Group Inc.(CME) could earn from processing the OTC trades is difficult because clearing fees and volumes aren’t set, said Bruce Weber, a finance professor at the London Business School.

- The Markit iTraxx Asia index of 50 investment-grade borrowers outside Japan fell to 320 basis points at 9:30 a.m. Hong Kong time, according to ICAP Plc prices, from about 345 on Jan. 23 before the Chinese New Year holiday. The Markit iTraxx Australia index was quoted 10 basis points lower at 305 as of 9:55 a.m. in Sydney, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. data show.

- Allstate Corp.(ALL) will cut 1,000 jobs at its life insurance operations and review the products sold by the unit after losses on investments caused the company’s first unprofitable year as a public firm. Shares dropped 10.8 percent in extended trading. Allstate’s private equity, real estate and hedge fund investments produced a $101 million loss in the fourth quarter, compared with an $88 million profit a year earlier. Hedge fund losses of $96 million dragged down results in the so-called alternative investments, while real estate funds lost $30 million and private equity earned $25 million. The company had a total of $2.79 billion in the alternative assets at yearend, making up about 2.9 percent of total investment assets, compared with 2.1 percent a year earlier.

- Qualcomm Inc.(QCOM), the world’s biggest maker of mobile-phone chips, reported a 56 percent drop in first-quarter profit and cut its annual sales forecast after the recession curbed growth and hurt its investments. Qualcomm fell $2.10, or 5.7 percent, to $34.72 in late trading after closing at $36.82 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

- Sepracor Inc.(SEPR), the maker of the Lunesta sleeping pill, said it will cut 530 jobs, or about 20 percent of its workforce. Sepracor also said it expects earnings of $2.10 to $2.70 a share in 2009 and revenue of $1.15 billion to $1.25 billion. The forecast, based on the mid-range of the estimate, is 50 percent higher than reported 2008 earnings of $1.60 a share, the company said. Sepracor rose $2.37, or 17 percent, to $16 at 4:56 p.m. New York time in extended trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

- Novartis AG is injecting more money into its hunt for acquisitions and licensing deals as competitors Pfizer Inc.(PFE) and GlaxoSmithKline Plc snap up companies and products. Novartis’s unit that scouts for products, evaluates projects and carries out due diligence has gotten “significantly” more funding, said Joe Jimenez, head of the company’s pharmaceutical division, yesterday in an interview.

Wall Street Journal:

- Government officials seeking to revamp the U.S. financial bailout have discussed spending another $1 trillion to $2 trillion to help restore banks to health, according to people familiar with the matter. President Barack Obama's new administration is wrestling with how to stem the continuing loss of confidence in the financial system, as it divides up the remaining $350 billion from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program launched last fall. The potential size of rescue efforts being discussed suggests the administration may need to ask Congress for more funds. Some of the remaining $350 billion of TARP funds has already been earmarked for other efforts, including aid to auto makers and to homeowners facing foreclosure.

- Minnesota's U.S. Senate trial drilled deep into the details of the recount itself Wednesday, with a lawyer for Republican Norm Coleman grilling a state election official on why some rejected absentee ballots were counted and some weren't. Coleman attorney Joe Friedberg questioned Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann for several hours, and elicited numerous examples of apparently inconsistent standards for deciding which absentees to count. At one point, Mr. Friedberg asked Mr. Gelbmann, "People whose votes should have been counted have been disenfranchised, is that correct?" "That is absolutely correct, yes," Mr. Gelbmann answered.

- European governments are rightly wondering which lessons they should learn from the current financial crisis. Recently, the European Commissioner for Internal Markets, Charlie McCreevy, commented that "our supervisory systems are not up to the mark," implying that a regulatory fix is much needed. For sure, if Europe's policy makers are to make the right decisions, they should resist the current political mythology -- whose basic tenet is that the crisis exploded largely because of a wild deregulation of American financial markets. Comparing regulatory systems across time or space is a daunting exercise. There are probably more pages and volumes of financial regulation today, on both sides of the Atlantic, than ever before. This may be justified, at least in part, by formidable increases in the size and sophistication of markets, accompanied by what may have been the greatest amount of financial innovation since the Italians invented double-entry accounting in the Middle Ages. However, let's go back to just a few months before the subprime crisis erupted. The argument back then was that U.S. financial markets were overregulated -- and as a results were losing competitiveness. This was said to be to the advantage not only of emerging Asia but of the Old Continent -- which, through the single EU market, was innovating and liberalizing finance. In January 2007, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Sen. Charles Schumer -- both far from being champions of unfettered competition -- published a report which emphasized the movement of IPOs from the U.S. to the EU. From 2001 to 2007, the value of IPOs in the EU grew from 28% of those in the U.S. to 239%. The costs and risks of doing business in the U.S. were perceived as being high -- and growing -- due to taxation and financial regulations such as those concerning corporate governance and market manipulation. Then there are all the antitrust cases and class-action securities lawsuits. Hedge funds, investment banking and private equity increasingly moved to the Old Continent from the U.S. over the last few years. Nevertheless, some analysts have blamed the current financial crisis in part on U.S. authorities' supposed tolerance for opaque over-the-counter derivatives that grew like weeds. But if this is the case, then the EU does not look more virtuous than the U.S. According to the Bank for International Settlements, in 2007 the average value of daily transactions in OTC derivatives peaked at nearly $1.7 trillion in Europe, almost three times the figure for the U.S. Likewise, if overleveraging by U.S. banks was a consequence of regulatory laxity, we should then note that European authorities were no less in thrall of laissez-faire than their American counterparts. Many of the largest and most highly regulated European commercial banks were much more leveraged than those supposedly unregulated American investment banks. Indeed, they were hit by the fire at its very inception, in August 2007. (very good article)

- New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is expanding the scope of his investigation into bonuses paid by Merrill Lynch & Co., with the inquiry now likely to include whether directors and shareholders were misled about giant losses at the securities firm, a person familiar with the situation said. Mr. Cuomo plans to press John Thain, the former Merrill chairman and chief executive who was forced to resign last week from Bank of America Corp., on what he told Merrill directors about ballooning losses in mid-December, this person said.

- The House passed an $819 billion tax-and-spending bill Wednesday, in a recession-fighting effort that would extend the reach of the federal government across the U.S. economy by reshaping policy on energy, education, health care and social programs. The House bill is one of the largest single stimulus packages in history, almost equal to the entire cost of annual federal spending under Congress's discretion. A parallel Senate measure, which is expected to come to a vote next week, is now valued at nearly $900 billion. Either bill, if enacted, would push the federal debt toward levels not seen since the second World War. The package embodies President Barack Obama's philosophy, stated in his inaugural address, that a nation in crisis has moved beyond "stale political arguments" over the size and reach of government. The package, which would cost more than the entire Iraq War, would reverse the Bush administration's approach to boosting the economy. That approach relied heavily on tax cuts that tended to put money in the pockets of middle-class and more affluent Americans. The $275 billion in tax relief offered in the stimulus package focuses more on lower-income families. It also includes business incentives to spur job creation and a $500 payroll tax holiday for workers. The 244-188 vote was not what Mr. Obama had hoped for. A week of presidential wooing -- including a visit to the Capitol, a return visit to the White House by moderate House Republicans and a bipartisan cocktail party Wednesday night -- did not yield a single Republican vote. The president also lost 11 Democrats.

- In the latest effort to prop up a sector of the finance industry, federal regulators on Wednesday guaranteed $80 billion in uninsured deposits at the powerful institutions that service the nation's credit unions -- a maneuver that shows how the economic crisis continues to ripple across the U.S.

MarketWatch.com:
- Gold takes a rest. Commentary: Gold’s short-term trend likely to be down. Consider the latest readings of the Hulbert Gold Newsletter Sentiment Index (HGNSI), which reflects the average recommended gold-market exposure among a subset of short-term gold-timing newsletters tracked by the Hulbert Financial Digest. As of Tuesday night, the HGNSI stood at 60.9%. This is identical to where the HGNSI stood at the end of December, when I last devoted a column to gold sentiment. Over the two weeks following that column, of course, bullion dropped by around $70 an ounce. Contrarian concern about gold's short-term trend isn't just based on this one data point, however. I have more than 25 years of daily data for the HGNSI, and rigorous econometric tests show that the inverse correlation between HGNSI levels and the gold market's subsequent short-term direction is statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. This is why the HGNSI's current level is so ominous. To put it in context, consider that this sentiment gauge's average reading over the last five years has been 32.6%, only slightly more than half where it stands now. Over the last five years, furthermore, the HGNSI has been higher than where it is now just 13% of the time.

NY Times:

- YouTube and the William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent agency, are close to signing a deal that would place the company’s clients in made-for-the-Web productions. The deal, the first of its kind, would underscore the impact that the Internet has had on media companies. Already, some actors and other celebrities are creating their own content for the Web, bypassing the often arduous process of developing a program for a television network. The YouTube deal would give Morris clients an ownership stake in the videos they create for the Web site.

- US Sports Teams Bringing TV, Internet to Stadiums.

IBD:

- In 2001, Brian Biles and Kai Li co-founded Data Domain (DDUP) to update this process by backing up data to a disk-based system that is more durable and compact than tape. That may not sound too complicated, but Data Domain's innovation was to make it cheap enough to compete with tapes on cost.

Reuters:

- Outsourcing, Indian-style, is challenged as never before by an erosion in business confidence that makes corporate spending, even to generate quick cost-savings, harder to justify.

- The Federal Reserve on Wednesday inched closer to buying U.S. government bonds in a new front in its fight against the credit crisis and signaled unease over the risk of deflation with the economy weakening. The Fed reiterated that, if needed, it would expand an existing program of buying large quantities of mortgage-related debt, and that it was about to launch another program to shore up auto, credit card and small-business lending.

- The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a controversial "Buy America" steel provision as part of an $825 billion package to help pull the U.S. economy out of recession. The provision requires public works projects funded by the bill to use only U.S.-made iron and steel. House leaders included the language despite strong objections from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups which said it would set a bad example for other countries considering their own economic stimulus plans.

Financial Times:
- Russia’s banking system needs a large capital injection as it prepares for a sharp increase in defaults by companies and consumers, one of the country’s leading bankers has warned. Andrei Kostin, chairman and chief executive of VTB, the large state-controlled lender, said the bank had opened talks with the Russian government about a capital increase designed to shore up its tier one capital ratio – a key measure of banking strength. “There is now a general view among experts in Russia that the level of non-performing debts will rise to 8-12 per cent [of total loans]. That will represent a very big threat to the Russian banking sector,” Mr Kostin said in an interview with the Financial Times on the fringes of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

TimesOnline:
- Britain will be hit harder than any other advanced nation in the worst recession for more than 60 years, world economists warned last night. In the bleakest assessment yet of British prospects, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast that the economy would shrink by 2.8 per cent this year, twice as much as it previously thought and far more than the 2 per cent average drop for developed nations in 2009.

- More than $260 billion (£182 billion) has been wiped from the wealth of Russia’s billionaires over the past eight months as the credit crunch has sent the value of its currency and largest industrial groups plummeting, according to one of Russia’s largest private banks. The meltdown in the private wealth of Russian oligarchs including Oleg Deripaska, Roman Abramovich and Alexei Mordashov reflected a 68 per cent slide in Moscow’s Micex share index since it peaked in May.

Guardian:

- Officials of Barack Obama's administration have drafted a letter to Iran from the president aimed at unfreezing US-Iranian relations and opening the way for face-to-face talks, the Guardian has learned. The US state department has been working on drafts of the letter since Obama was elected on 4 November last year. It is in reply to a lengthy letter of congratulations sent by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on 6 November. Diplomats said Obama's letter would be a symbolic gesture to mark a change in tone from the hostile one adopted by the Bush administration, which portrayed Iran as part of an "axis of evil". It would be intended to allay the ­suspicions of Iran's leaders and pave the way for Obama to engage them directly, a break with past policy. State department officials have composed at least three drafts of the letter, which gives assurances that Washington does not want to overthrow the Islamic regime, but merely seeks a change in its behaviour. The letter would be addressed to the Iranian people and sent directly to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or released as an open letter. The scale of the problem facing the new American president was reinforced yesterday when a senior aide to Ahmadinejad, Aliakbar Javanfekr, said that, despite the calls from the US, Iran had no intention of stopping its nuclear activities. When asked about a UN resolution calling for the suspension of Iran's uranium enrichment, Javanfekr, the presidential adviser for press affairs, replied: "We are past that stage."

Late Buy/Sell Recommendations
- None of note

Night Trading
Asian Indices are unch. to +1.25% on average.
S&P 500 futures -.62%.
NASDAQ 100 futures -.61%.

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Earnings of Note
Company/EPS Estimate
- (LLY)/1.05

- (ATK)/1.94

- (SII)/1.02

- (XEL)/.37

- (MMM)/.93

- (IP)/.20

- (LLL)/1.98

- (HOT)/.36

- (ZMH)/1.00

- (MO)/.37

- (EK)/.18

- (UA)/.17

- (F)/-1.24

- (ITW)/.48

- (RTN)/1.11

- (CAL)/-.86

- (MXIM)/.13

- (SPWRA)/.59

- (KLAC)/-.06

- (CA)/.37

- (WMS)/.36

- (BRCM)/.26

- (CB)/1.52

- (VAR)/.52

- (YRCW)/-.64

- (MCHP)/.22

- (MWW)/.26

- (JNPR)/.31

- (QSII)/.45

- (ACS)/.78

- (AMZN)/.38

- (BDK)/.69

- (AN)/.11

- (LCC)/-2.11

- (RCL)/.07

- (OXY)/.95

- (D)/.68

- (CELG)/.42

- (PII)/1.09

- (FO)/.86

- (CL)/.98

Economic Releases

8:30 am EST

- Durable Goods Orders for December are estimated to fall 2.0% versus a 1.5% decline in November.

- Durables Ex Transports for December are estimated to fall 2.7% versus a .6% rise in November.

- Initial Jobless Claims for last week are estimated to fall to 575K versus 589K the prior week.

- Continuing Claims are estimated to rise to 4620K versus 4607K prior.

10:00 am EST

- New Home Sales for December are estimated to fall to 397K versus 407K in November.

Upcoming Splits
- None of note

Other Potential Market Movers
- The weekly EIA weekly natural gas inventory report, World Economic Forum, (DFS) financial briefing, (KMP) analyst meeting, (ASH) shareholders meeting and (SCHW) business update could also impact trading today.

BOTTOM LINE: Asian indices are higher, boosted by financial and technology stocks in the region. I expect US equities to open modestly lower and to rally into the afternoon, finishing mixed. The Portfolio is 75% net long heading into the day.