As for the authenticity of the "Kennedy-Bonds," we still have doubts, but the U.S. government bonds (worth/in denominations of ? ) some 358 million euros seem (credible/ believable). They are made of filigree paper of excellent quality," said [Colonel Rodolfo] Mecarelli.
Was die Echtheit der Kennedy-Bonds angeht, haben wir noch Zweifel, aber die US-Staatsanleihen im Wert von rund 358 Millionen Euro scheinen glaubwürdig. Sie sind aus Filigranpapier von ausgezeichneter Qualität“, so Mecarelli.
The bonds, with a face value of more than $134 billion, are probably forgeries, Colonel Rodolfo Mecarelli of the Guardia di Finanza in Como, Italy, said today.
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This letter must come to you as a big surprise, but I believe it is only a day that people meet and become great friends and business partners. I am Mr. Shoichi Nakagawa, former Finance Minister for a Group of 7 country. I write you this proposal in good faith, believing that I can trust you with the information I am about to reveal to you.
I have an urgent and very confidential business proposition for you. In February of this year an agent of a foreign power spiked my cold medicine with opiates causing me to nod off during an important press conference. I was subsequently forced to resign in disgrace.
As my termination loomed I took the chance to retain US DOLLARS 134 BILLION in negotiable bearer bonds I found forgotten in the dusty bottom drawer of the prime minister's desk. I have since, by the grace of God, deposited these documents with trusted associates in Italy.
As I am under constant surveillance I cannot directly deposit these bonds without the help of a foreigner and that is why I am contacting you for an assistance. My associates will travel to Switzerland by train to deliver the documents to the Swiss banking organization of your choice.
If you accept to work with me, I want you to state how you wish us to share the funds in percentage, so that both parties will be satisfied. If you are interested, contact me as soon as you receive this message so we can go over the details. Thanking you in advance and may God bless you. Please, treat with utmost confidentiality.
I wait your urgent response.
Regards,
Mr. Shoichi Nakagawa
The permanent bid - manipulation?
Recently, I read more comments on the nature like "The market is rising against all the technical indications" or since a few weeks almost every day of some analysts that a "technical Correction of 10-15% is healthy and inevitable. " But nothing happens. Corrections are about 2-3% not out and despite negative indicators en masse the market is rising constantly. This is indeed quite unusual, at least if you compare it to 'normal' Market behavior compares.
No wonder that there are increasing rumors that Market is manipulated. Normally I give to such conspiracy theories little. They draw most only depends on the real relationships to recognize. However, I have even in recent weeks some phenomena observed close to the Thoughts of a targeted manipulation is not quite so seem implausible lassen.
First one can observe that whenever the U.S. market over night falls (the futures will be 24 h traded) and the next day clearly negative for open threatens, just before stock market opening is a constant Bid (a collector) in the futures market and This opening up a piece raises. Especially in pre-trade is the relatively low volumes possible. This happens so regularly that already many people's attention have become.
Secondly appears whenever the market crucial points umzukippen suddenly threatens a great bid in the market oblivion. Finally, we are on 29 May and on 3 June shortly before Closing stock market view. On 29 For example, in May the market is threatened once again in the 200 -- Day abzuprallen line and down to rotate. For technical analysts this failure would be a clear Sell signal was. Since the market is already very long without any correction was gone, would be a greater downward movement was normal. But then came a few minutes before the close an unlimited orders over 5,000 S & P500 index futures in the market and catapulted them within seconds 1.5% above and on the 200-day line. The value of these orders amounted to nearly 250 million U.S. dollars!
It is hard to imagine that an institutional investor his orders so kursbeeinflussend in the market represents. Normally, one would such an order evenly distributed throughout the day and thus kursschonend in the market. On other days, similar things happened. So I ask myself, who the motivations here, and where the money comes. Only very very few institutional investors have the means, with such large orders to play. "
If there is no tampering, then there are at least unusually crazy times. Maybe I really can see ghosts, and the market is involuntarily from the institutional investors driven by the current upward movement have completely overslept. As far as I know there are very many! The stand on the sidelines and waiting for a correction to buy into the market them. You do not want in these overbought Market. But it comes and will not Correction. Maybe but then loses a or other nerve and goes "all in"? This mix of the short-acting "less negative "news, on the basis of the acting Stimuli until the autumn can pause, combined underinvestment with institutional investors is an explosive. It could lead to the market fundamentals of its decouple. We inflating a new stock and Commodity bubble experience. I already have a name to read: BGB - Bernanke-Geithner bubble. Everything well and good if these bubbles are not the property had suddenly and unexpectedly to burst.
Six Flags said it filed for Chapter 11 protection with the unanimous support of its lenders' steering committee.
The plan will result in a deleveraging of the company's balance sheet by about $1.8 billion, as well as the elimination of more than $300 million in preferred stock obligations.
"The current management team inherited a $2.4 billion debt load that cannot be sustained, particularly in these challenging financial markets," Mark Shapiro, the chief executive of Six Flags, said in a news release.
Great work Mark: taking a cue from the admin and placing the blame squarely on the previous management.
In addition to Dan Snyder who acquired the company in a proxy fight several years ago, other major equity wipe outs include Bill Gates and Jim Simons, whose Cascade Investments and RenTec funds, own 11.1% and 5.5% of the already worthless stock (page 5 of the Voluntary Petition below). We highly doubt this event will dent the latter's relationship with its PBs JPM and DB as they continue aspiring to new heights in purchasing every imaginable share of SPY and IWM available.
Democrats in the House and Senate are working on legislation that would require all Americans to have health insurance, prohibit insurers from refusing to cover pre-existing conditions and place other restrictions on the industry.Why raise taxes? Can't the Treasury just print a cool quadrillion (in bearer bonds, to be unsuccessfully smuggled by vicious ninjas into Bern so that UBS can pretend to be buying up long-dated maturities for its own account) and that will be that. Timmy has already stocked up on enough paper to run the printers at turbo for a good 4 years (and even accounted for the occassional PC Load Letter error) and Ben has bought every single available Port-A-Potty (Citi, BofA, Regions Financial) in which to flush all the little green pieces of paper that he buys from Timmy.Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. He also said the measure’s cost will reach beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a down payment for the policy changes.
Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.”
The NYSE seems to be having a major liquidity event. Taking liquidity (market orders) is now prohibited for the rest of the day and only limit orders (Providing liquidity) are allowed.
Sphere: Related Content02:59pm 12 Jun 09:
As a follow-up to today's issue with Matching Engine One, we have found that market oddlot orders and oddlot portions of partial roundlot orders (PRLs) are not executing in the affected symbols (listed below). However, oddlot orders and PRLs with limit prices are executing properly in these symbols. For the remainder of the day, customers should cancel unexecuted market oddlot orders and the oddlot portions of partial roundlot orders in the affected symbols, and submit only oddlot orders and PRLs with limit prices.
Market oddlot and PRLs in Matching Engine One (Update)
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S&P shocked the the CMBS market last week by advising that its new models, if adopted, would likely prompt ratings cuts on 95 percent of top bonds issued during the peak of the real estate cycle in 2007 and 85 percent of CMBS from 2006. S&P is mulling responses from a formal request for comment.Anyway, from the CBRE piece:Some 50 insurers have contacted Horsham, Pennsylvania-based Realpoint over the last few days, saying, "you guys need to get approved" by the NAIC, Dobilas said.
"Realpoint acts as a trump card to any action that S&P takes," he said. "We don't perceive any problem" getting approved by the NAIC, he added.
The NAIC, which represents all of U.S. state and territory insurance regulators, affirmed that Realpoint's application has been received by NAIC's Securities and Valuations Office.
The company's sales units in Europe, Taiwan and Japan are not part of the Chapter 11 filing, according to reports. MagnaChip has assets up to $50 million, but it also estimated liabilities of more than $1 billion.Looks like being stuck with a foundry that only allowed 1 megapixel cell phone CMOS and several hundred turns of leverage was not the recipe for success that CVC thought it was. Oh well - here is hoping that KTB knows how to run the business now that it has been stripped of all that bad, bad debt.
At the same time, a fund led by South Korea's KTB Securities Co. Ltd. has acquired MagnaChip and its affiliates, according to court documents. The deal is valued at about $80 million.
In 2004, the non-memory chip unit of Hynix was sold to a newly-created South Korean company formed by Citigroup Venture Capital Equity Partners L.P., CVC Asia Pacific Ltd. and Francisco Partners.
The new company, MagnaChip, inherited three main business lines from Hynix, including CMOS image sensors, LCD drivers and foundry services. In 2005, MagnaChip's sales were $937.7 million, a 13.6 percent decrease over 2004. It also showed a loss of $100.9 million in 2005.
Simon Property: "We are moving from Neutral to Buy on Simon given the company’s opportunity to boost external growth (and improve SPG’s core U.S. portfolio) as they prepare to become a major player in the emerging “M&A” market in U.S. retail real estate. We are modeling acquisitions of $1 billion in ’10 at an 8.5% cap rates. These new assumptions take our ’10 estimate from $5.75 to $5.95."Likely much more coming over the next week as economic fundamentals and beta underperformance over the past 2 months has drastically changed the prospects for REITs.
Federal Realty: "Quality premium justifies Neutral rating. We are upgrading Federal Realty from Underperform to Neutral due to the fact the stock’s premium relative to its peers (on a price-to-FFO multiple basis) has contracted from 42% to 26% during the beta rally. [TD: upgrade on underperformance vs peers based on beta, not on fundamentals... fucking brilliant].
Developers Diversified: "Maintain Neutral, raising price objective. We are raising our DDR PO from $3.50 to $5.00 based on a higher forward NAV (from $3.76 to $4.84), and a modest reduction in our price objective’s discount to that forward NAV (was 5% is now 0%). We are also raising our ’10 FFO per share estimate from $1.44 to $1.59, to reflect the reduction in dilution given the issuance of fewer shares at the stock’s current price. [Give it 2 weeks until ML does another follow on here].
Taubman Centers: "Maintain Neutral, raising price objective [take DDR template, change name of company, recycle everything else]. We believe that Taubman is positioned with a solid balance sheet and has better than average liquidity than many of its retail REIT peers."
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None of us, the trustee, the Dealer Managers, the Exchange Agent, the Information Agent (each as defined herein) nor any other person makes any recommendation as to whether you should tender your shares of Trust Preferred Securities. You must make your own decision after reading this document and the documents incorporated by reference herein and consulting with your advisors.So, maybe Goldman Sachs can clarify just which exemption it was using yesterday to issue an Upgrade of Regions Financial to a Buy, when the company should be in an implicit quiet period pending the duration of the exchange offer. Not surprisingly the stock screamed 12% higher yesterday on over 9% of the float turning over. While clarifying, can Goldman also please vouch that it's prop desk had no exposure to RF stock. Because if it did, that would really take the Larry Summers prize for stock manipulation moment of the year.
Inventories at U.S. businesses fell in April for an eighth straight month, the longest stretch since 2002, as companies cut back in the face of slowing sales.The 1.1 percent decline in stockpiles followed a revised 1.3 percent drop in March that was larger than previously estimated, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Sales decreased 0.3 percent.
Companies are limiting production and spending to draw down stockpiles that piled up last year when demand plunged. A record inventory reduction in the first quarter was among the largest drags on the economy and may set the stage for stabilization and a return to growth later this year.
The last point is debatable especially with the GM and Chrysler bankruptcy, which are sure to lead to substantial new excess capacity in the system, and need for much less restocking and capex. Here is how the green shoot is planted in the same Bloomberg piece:
Government infrastructure projects, smaller stockpile reductions and stabilization in residential construction will help the economy start growing in the second half of this year.
Fiscal stimulus and business investment will lead the U.S. recovery, General Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt said June 9. The coming recovery will not be as strong as the one following the last severe recession in 1982, he said.
One could beg to differ with the CEO of CNBC's parent. A casual glance at the chart below indicates that in prior periods, the hit to inventories is in fact a multiple to that of sales underperformance. This is especially true since a vast portion of the leverage used in the past decade to finance expansion and inventory buildouts has now been lost for ever. If the chart below has any predictive power, it is only a matter of time before GDP expansion pundits, and those calling for an end to the recession as soon as September, are left scratching their heads how to invert their bullish thesis and not seem like book-talking propagandists.
hat tip Avi
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