Strangeness

I thought the world was ending ...

AAPL reports good numbers, profit gains year over year. Yes, I said "gains".

Lately, IBM, UTX and BNI all had good numbers. The "real economy" seems OK for well run companies.

For poorly run companies though, the pain is great as prior sleaze and fat now bear on them.

By the way, why are British stock analysts so much more reasoned and well-spoken ? They seem to be able to do better analysis and articulate their opinions better. They provide plenty of facts to buttress their cases. Quite puzzling ...

Sleaking of sleaze, Merrill Lynch paid out $4 billion in "bonuses" just before the sale to BAC closed. So the firm loses untold billions and no one is responsible. Amazing greed and sleaze - sheer looting. Why is John Thain still at the firm ?

Word of the Day

"Dissentient" - noun and adjective [$10]; A Mencken word.
Dissentient means (adjective) disagreeing with the majority or official view; (noun) a person who dissents.
Sentence: Bunkerman seems to be quite the lone dissentient with his conclusions that hedge fund rapine bear raids and subsequent panic selling caused the recession that began strongly in midsummer and accelerated in October. The principle problem was the massive concentration of monies in unproductive hedge fund speculation instead of productive investments.