America's labor unions are finally waking up from their deep slumber and noticing the vast schism in American society between the haves and the have nots. The catalyst: Wall Street's $16.2 billion bonus pay day. As a result Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest union organization, and a firm supporter of the transaction tax which was proposed in late 2009 and then promptly buried after some serious lobbying by Wall Street, will announce today "two weeks of protests aimed at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the most profitable securities firm in U.S
We have now reached a point when a Senator has to write a well-intentioned letter to the very administration he serves, (whose sworn duty is to preserve the wealth of all of its constituents, not just Goldman Sachs), with a cautionary tale that continued lying to the general population combined with a culture of opacity and persistent fraud, will lead to a disastrous effect to the economy and to the very fabric of American society.
Over the past few months, Arianna Huffington has initiated a grass roots campaign called " Move your money " whose purpose is to forcefully shift an allocation of the deposit base from the TBTFs which have captured the government via the Wall Street-D.C. lobby complex. While we hope this campaign succeeds, we are somewhat skeptical that it will achieve its goal.
1) Somebody (wink wink) spreads a rumor that shorting government-owned companies will be banned. Citi is one of these companies. 2) Rumor spreads, causing AIG, C, FNM and FRE to skyrocket
Charlie Gasparino over at Fox Business News reports a rumor that the government may be looking to dispose of its 27% Citi stake at some point over the next 3 months. Logistics aside, presumably somehow this means that even more bankrupt companies like AIG, FNM and FRE are probably next in line for offloading the taxpayer stake into the hands of hapless hedge/sovereigns funds. We hope it is not the same hedge funds that have recently received subpoenas and C&D orders from ever shorting the euro (i.e., going long the dollar).As a reference point the gov't owns 27.01% of Citi which has a hilarious market cap of $108 billion, and owns 80.66% of AIG with its $23.5 billion capitalization (and $107 billion in debt)
The ravenous algo has just sniffed out AIG.
Sorry, Merkel, Papanderou et al. BaFin finds that there is no sign that CDS speculation is involved when it comes to Greek government bonds, even as the volume in cash bonds has spiked.
To paraphrase the 20-page speech: it is still just the speculators' fault, who are now "threatening not only Greece, but the entire global economy" so burn them all post haste before they can read all the declassified GS prospectuses, and scour the footnotes thus uncovering the truly deplorable state of all European budgets, also please ignore this huge corruption problem we have, it's under control, oh, and it is time our globalization "partners" realize that we are critical in the future of the free world, and bail us out, even though we have repeatedly said we need no steenkin' bail out, or else global financial crisis v2 - here we come. Now show me where Ben Bernanke's office is.
Now that the market is fully back to its usual melt-up gimmicks, when fundamentals do not matter in the least, and the only potential stock drivers are technicals, which for the market dominating algos typically reduce to such simplistic signals as stock price momentum (and reversion) and short interest as a % of share float, we present our summary of the worst of the worst. The following 40 companies are those names (among the Russell 2000) that have underperformed the market either by a little or a lot, now that the S&P is flat for the year, and which still carry a substantial short interest as a % of the total float (with a 20% of float short minimum)
Another European country is about to be cut to junk by the rating agencies, after a whopping 93% of Iceland voters turned down the ironically named Icesave bill in a historic referendum, which would have saddled citizens with an additional $16k in debt to compensate the UK and Holland with a $5.3 billion note for the failure of Landsbanki.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
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