S&P Stocks Over 50 Day Moving Average

Jim Taylor, Turning Hard Times Into Good Times, Oct 6, 2009

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Parker: Stocks Headed for Sharp Correction

Stock markets around the world have overrun equilibrium levels and are thus likely to drop back through November, says Robert Parker, vice chairman of asset management for Credit Suisse.

“During October and November, we could see up to a 10 percent correction in developed equity markets and 20 to 25 percent in emerging equity markets,” Parker told CNBC.

He doesn’t expect a bear market, as rising corporate earnings and investors’ willingness to commit cash buoy global stock markets. (more)

Top 10 Americans for monetary reform: #10: 86% of Economics professors during Great Depression

The financial crisis in America today could be over almost instantaneously through monetary reform. Monetary reform is a fundamental shift in how America creates money. The shift is from a Robber Baron-era design of banks creating credit to lend to us at interest and ever-increasing debt, to our community (government) creating it for the direct payment of public goods and services. The benefits of monetary reform are conservatively $1 TRILLION every year, the end of the national debt, and full employment. (more)

Michael Milken, 60,000 Deaths, and the Story of Dendreon

This story, like too many others, begins with Jim Cramer, the CNBC personality, making “a mistake.”

On September 26, 2005, Cramer announced to his television audience the sad news (punctuated by funny sound effects – a clown horn, a crashing airplane) that Provenge, an experimental treatment for prostate cancer, had flopped. Thousands of end-stage patients had been pinning their hopes on Provenge, but according to Cramer the treatment had just been rejected by the Food & Drug Administration. It would never go to market.

This seemed odd, because Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), the company developing Provenge, had not yet submitted an application for FDA approval. As everybody in the biotech investment community knew, Dendreon had, in fact, only recently completed Phase 3 clinical trials and probably would not face scrutiny from an FDA advisory panel for at least another year. (more)

US Cedes Economic Independence To IMF

Dow Will Fall to 6,300 by Year End: Portfolio Manager

With the prospect of higher unemployment hanging over the markets, some experts expect a correction. So are they right? Michael Cuggino, president and portfolio manager at Permanent Portfolio Funds, and John Lekas, CEO and portfolio manager at Leader Capital, shared their insights. (more)

Dropping Rents Will Drag House Prices Down with Them

The vacancy rate for rental apartments in the U.S. is now 7.8% and climbing, says the Wall Street Journal. This is the highest vacancy rate in 23 years.

Worse, the vacancy rate is expected to keep climbing through the winter, ultimately hitting the highest rate on record.

This is good news for renters and bad news for landlords. It's also bad news for anyone who owns and would like to sell a house.

Why are rising rental vacancies bad news for homeowners? (more)

Inspector General: Treasury Secretary Forced Banks to Surrender Ownership Interest to Government

In a new report, Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), reveals that then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and key federal regulators forced the nation’s nine largest financial institutions to take billions in taxpayer bailout dollars in October 2008, threatening that if the banks refused, the government would take their stock shares anyway.

Barofsky’s report, released Monday, examines the circumstances under which the government selected the initial nine participants of its Capital Purchase Program (CPP) bailout. The report found that the government picked the banks because of their size and involvement in the U.S. financial system, not because they needed the money or not. (more)