WTF? I mean, REALLY, how can the Dems fall apart this quickly?
I’m not going to get into a whole political thing here – Jon Stewart already said it very well on Monday when this Senate race was looing bad but – HOLY COW, did the Democrats just blow Massachusetts? And don’t write in to tell me that technically, the Whigs and the Repbublicans were two different parties – Lincoln was a Whig, so if you want to keep claiming him you’d better embrace your party’s roots… The Whig party was on quite a roll at one time with Harrison, Tyler and Fillmore all holding the Presidency as Whigs but after Lincoln made it 3 out of 4 Whigs to die in office, rebranding as Republicans seemed like a good idea!
I didn’t think Brown would win yesterday and, with the Health Care sector flying in anticipation of his victory, we went short into the close – figuring that was a better percentage play anyway as the market still seems nearer a top than a bottom and we have Housing Starts at 8:30 and PPI plus a lot of questionable earnings reports but, as I said to Members, if we do get through this and are still holding our highs – it’s going to be impossible to stay bearish.
SCHW missed last night, as did PNFP but we got good reports from ADTN, CREE, CSX, IBM, SUPX and WIT. BAC is our big miss so far this morning and that was my big concern with BK, HCBK, MTB, MS, NTRS, STT, USB and WFC all on deck with them. BK, USB and STT already cleared their bar – nothing too impressive, but surviving despite still very low revenues. Low revenues still concern me – EAT beat low expectations but revenues were down 17.6% from last year and last year was terrible. COH is holding up my rich getting richer theory as business there is up 11% with earnings about the same. In-line with our theory that retail investors have abandoned the markets, SCHW reports 23.2% lower revenues than last year.
The tone of earnings so far, companies making profits on lower revenues through cost-cutting, does not bode well for the bottom 90% of society and a Global Insight study indicates that unemployment may persist above 10% in parts of this country through 2013. “What is just as alarming as the double-digit unemployment in many of the nation’s major metro areas…
