The market is walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon.

the flogging continues

CSCO - 5%


EDIT: scratch that, now trading positive

I'm up on the tightwire
one side's ice and one is fire
its a circus game with you and me
I'm up on the tightrope
one side's worry and one is hope.....

leon russell sorta

CSCO getting hit. They must-a reported.

What a shock...CSCO is inline--Chambers almost ALWAYS has them beat by a penny. Things must be fugly, lol.

hahaha

cisco didn't "beat by a penny". like mogombo sez "we are fricken' doomed, morans".

Let me guess:

Chambers: While the macro environment in North America continues to be challenging, we expect our overseas performance to execute upon increased opportunity.

Channel-stuffing mofo.

For those who missed the big move in Micron...do not despair...DRAM sales still suck...you'll get your chance to go long this dead horse..

[attachmentid=95441]

Can't you buy DRAM in vending machines at the gas station now?

I think he coined the term "challenging" during the dot com implosion.

Definition: Challenging - in the process of adjusting balance sheet and income statement items to meet Wall Street expectations while watching your business deteriorate into the abyss. One qualification to this is the management must be heavily dumping their stock and options at the same time.

HALTED!

Prudential Financial Q4 Earnings Fall; Issues FY08 EPS Forecast - Quick Facts [PRU]

2/6/2008 4:14:35 PM Prudential Financial, Inc. (PRU) on Wednesday reported fourth quarter net income for its Financial Services Businesses of $792 million or $1.75 per common share, lower than $893 million or $1.88 per common share in the fourth quarter last year.

After-tax adjusted operating income for the Financial Services Businesses for the fourth quarter was $729 million or $1.61 per common share, down from $782 million or $1.65 per common share in the previous year quarter.

On a consolidated basis, which includes the results of both the Financial Services Businesses and the Closed Block Business, Prudential Financial, Inc. reported net income of $0.87 billion for the fourth quarter, lower than $1.037 billion in the year-ago quarter.

On average, 15 analysts polled by First Call/Thomson Financial expected the company to report earnings of $1.88 per share. blurb

*DJ MBIA To Revise 4Q Results >MBI
Again.....


*DJ MBIA To Issue $750 M In Common Stock
-----------------

*DJ MBIA Now Expects 4Q Oper Income $472.8M >MBI
*DJ MBIA To Decrease Previously-Reported 4Q Mark-To-Market Loss >MBI
*DJ MBIA To Decrease 4Q Mark-To-Market Loss By $110M >MBI

if I used their accountants for my taxes I'm pretty sure I would end up in jail with a quick lesson in waterboarding.......

LOL...Crapvision just ran a crawl saying "Alert: Warren Buffett says money is available and cheap"

ROFL!! Yeah...if you are WARREN BUFFETT!

Macy's checking in, things looking good there:

Macy's Lowers Profit Forecast, Will Cut 2,300 Jobs
By Cotten Timberlake

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Macy's Inc., the second-biggest U.S. department-store chain, cut its fourth-quarter earnings forecast after a decline in January sales and said it will eliminate 2,300 jobs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...pxZc&refer=home

Brocade continues to take it on the chin. In August of 2000 this stock reached $183 a share. Now it is just a shadow of its former self. Lots of support at $8 on the long term chart.

*DJ Buffett:Dollar 'Worthless' In 5-10 Yrs If Dlr Deficit Continues

*DJ CORRECT:Buffett:Dlr 'Worthless' If Current Acct Deficit Continues

(A headline published around 4:29 p.m. incorrectly said "dollar deficit"
instead of "current account deficit.")

Who in da heck is going to buy their common stock?

Awesome!

So they lose 110 million less, and their mkt cap goes up 250 million in the aftermarket!

Gotta love that leverage!

But wait... it gets better... Ambac is also up double digits in the aftermarket! And they haven't said sheet!

Gotta love that contagion!

Thank you George W. for your grand financial experiment on the Merican people...

Let's see, $44 billion times 'worthless'...

that'd be ....

I still don't understand why he sold his silver. I guess he made a tidy profit. But why not hold on as the dollar evaporates? I think someone encouraged him not to be the whale in that kiddy pool.

There's not much more than an incidental inverse coorelation, BUT..

If earl continues to fall, and gold gets a run,


there's hope for some of these junior miners to get moving...








etc....

he's not holding greenbacks. he's got "stuff". so, when the dollar goes "worthless" he will be worth infinite when measured in dollars. And will in fact own all the same crap just as before.

CSCO getting creamed again, down a buck & a half from the close.

when calling a multinational corporation's customer service department in India because their chinese built product broke with in the first week of use, the standard phone menu will be:
press 1 for mandarin, 2 for spanish, 3 for english.....
thank you for choosing english... please call back between the hours 9am and 5pm India time.

Buffett is VASTLY overrated. He made a couple of great plays in the 70's, and right after the tech bubble burst. That's been about it, as far as his "outperformance" goes. His infallibility is largely a media creation, ala Colin Powell. A few weeks ago, Motley Fool had this article about how Berkshire Hathaway has done better than gold: http://msn.fool.com/investing/value/2008/0...edmsnlnk0010001 . They didn't site any meaningful statistics, and just expected the reader to take it at face value. I'm sure given some sort of time range, you can find that Berkshire did better than gold. But if THAT'S the measure you're going for, you can find a ton of stocks that did better than Berkshire! Plus, they CERTAINLY weren't using the timeframe of the past few years, as gold has CRUSHED Berkshire since the bull market begain in 2001. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=GLD&l...z=m&q=l&c=brk-a (the ETF only goes back to late '04, unfortunately, but even here, you can still see gold holding its own against Saint Warren rather nicely.)

Another thing that bothers me about Buffet, along with the adulation he gets, is that he makes these noncommital, non-offending statements that people of all sides use as "proof" that he is on their side. I remember during the tech bubble, he said he didn't "understand" it, which the bears used as some sort of validation. When it all fell apart, he got all this credit for "calling" it. Well, if he called it, why not just speak out against it outright?! Why all this mushy language?

Screw Buffett. Bears don't need him. How much of a genius he is- and whether or not I'm overdoing it with my criticism- will largely be determined in the next year or two. Stay tuned, it ought to be interesting...

Warburg is taking on another 3/4 billion of their stock. Good lord. They will use this to try to boner it tomorrow.

CSCO down 1.92...just hammered!

Hopefully there is a simple answer to this. Is it illegal to have more then 10K or is it just illegal to attempt a transaction above 10K. I also wonder how long the law has been in effect.

hey, doc, for some reason the message boards (both IDS and M2M) stopped working properly this afternoon on mac os + safari. the header, the left sided column, and the auto insurance ad are there; but the messages have slipped into interdimensional limbo.

but the MBs work fine on mac os + firefox.

being no technical whiz kid, i don't have any solutions; just thought you'd want to know.

in more important news, i've been aware for some time now that vladimir putin has been starring as the new james bond. how does he find the time or the inclination?

Investors gag on goog...

You didn't mention big time stock buy backs.

Tice on Gloomberg.

http://www.bloomberg.com/avp/avp.htm?clipS...q9XqD79gD_4.asf

I think Warburg Pincus is going to double down with some more prefered, doesn't sound good for the common.

I wonder what would happen if the Fed made this new interest rate cut official. The prospect of a market panic probably scares the hell out of them, which may be why they did it without announcing it.

Or maybe it really is just technical factors and they'll take it back up tomorrow.

If I remember correctly, He was facing some vey serious charges about allowing AIG to buy some instruments that inflated the AIG earnings. Both his silver and his AIG problems disappeared abou the same time.

Does Berkshire have a stake in AIG? I know they own GEICO, but AIG?

Many people are going to learn that their business models don't work anymore.

That the assumptions they made,don't add up in this slowing economy.

U.S. Job-Market Weakening Is Led by Self-Employed, Data Shows

By Carlos Torres

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The increase in U.S. unemployment that's jeopardizing economic growth is being driven by a drop in the number of people working for themselves, government figures indicate.

Hours worked by the self-employed dropped at a 15.5 percent annual pace in the last three months of 2007, the biggest decrease in 15 years, according to data provided to Bloomberg News today by the Labor Department.

The decline ``is probably related to the housing downturn, since one in six workers in construction is self-employed, twice the average for all industries,'' said Patrick Newport, an economist at Global Insight, a Lexington, Massachusetts, forecasting firm.

The figures may be another indication of how the deepest real-estate slump in a quarter century is filtering through the economic statistics. The Labor Department said today that worker productivity grew more than forecast last quarter as hours for all employees, including those who work for themselves, fell at a 1.5 percent pace, the most in five years.

The number of people running their own businesses dropped by 365,000 last quarter, compared with the same period in 2006, according to separate Labor Department numbers.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...n_Q0&refer=home

I posted this earlier on IDS. The Fraudsters amy be home frre if they don't have to pay on their CDSs, if the buyers can't produce the correct bond.

Insight: CDS market may create added risks
By Satayjit Das

Published: February 5 2008 15:31 | Last updated: February 5 2008 15:31

In May 2006, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, noted: “The credit default swap is probably the most important instrument in finance. … What CDS did is lay-off all the risk of highly leveraged institutions – and that’s what banks are, highly leveraged – on stable American and international institutions.”

The reality may prove different.

The CDS is economically similar to credit insurance. The buyer of protection (typically a bank) transfers the risk of default of a borrower (the reference entity) to a protection seller who for a fee indemnifies the protection buyer against credit losses. Current debate has focused on the size of the market. But the key problem is that a combination of documentation and counterparty risks means that the market may not function as participants and regulators hope if actual defaults occur.

CDS documentation, which is highly standardised, generally does not exactly match the terms of the underlying risk being hedged. CDS contracts are also technically complex in relation to the identity of the entity being hedged, the events that are covered and how the CDS contract is to be settled. This means that the hedge may not provide the protection sought.

In case of default, the protection buyer in CDS must deliver a defaulted bond or loan – the deliverable obligation – to the protection seller in return for receiving the face value of the delivered item (known as physical settlement). When Delphi defaulted, for example, the volume of CDS outstanding was $28bn against $5.2bn of bonds and loans. On actively traded names CDS volumes are substantially greater than outstanding debt making it difficult to settle contracts.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f75c80e4-d3fd-11...00779fd2ac.html

This chart doesn't make any sense to me.. it has to be effed up...

Fuctures getting punched in the face

"MAKE IT GO AWAY!! MAKE IT GO AWAY!!"

What is the question? 10k of what?

That chart makes perfect sense to me. It would make more sense if it were on an inverse scale but what it tells me is that the market went from short term Dover Sole to short term overbought in a few days, and that the market is now in danger of crashing because it became overbought very quickly against an extremely weak trend.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Excuse me if you, too, are as confused as I am...

Hey Doc, heard anything else from your Canadian bank contact?

cash money. greenbacks.

If I remember correctly, one of his companies allowed AIG to move some of their bad bets off balance sheet during an earnings reporting period. It was during the period of Hank Geenberg's removal.
An investigation was started. Nothing happened, but about the same time Buffet disposed of his silver and the SLV ETF was started.
The GATA guys thought is was a quid pro quo.

"MAKE IT GO AWAY!! MAKE IT GO AWAY!!"



We need to assemble the seditious sum of 10,000 greenbacks and ship them to the Keeper of the Avater.

NDX at a very critical point here: EMA 200 weekly at 1741 and a bit below that uptrend. Support COULD be given by the 38 fibo.

NDX (Nasdaq 100) weekly

[attachmentid=95447]