The video below features the financial mess set to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody. The tragedy comes courtesy of “Drag Queen”.

Source: YouTube, October 24, 2009 (hat tip: Barry Ritholtz).

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Hat tip: Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture, October 21, 2009.

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This is a guest post by Barry Ritholtz, editor of The Big Picture Blog and author of the newly released book, Bailout Nation

With futures deep in the red, let’s take a look at how markets do after big quarters. The quarter ending September 30 saw the Dow putting in its best quarter since 1998, up a solid ~15%.

With everyone waiting for a pullback, and yesterday (Thursday] and today [Friday] viewed as the probable start, perhaps its time to review some history. What has happened historically after markets have put in record setting quarters - 15%+?

For the most part, momentum has trumped mean reversion historically. Jim Bianco crunched the numbers, and he found that “stocks returned an average of 1.33% over the month following one of these record quarters, 3.46% over the following quarter, and 9.95% over the following year”.

It is worth

This is a guest post by Barry Ritholtz, editor of The Big Picture Blog and author of the popular book, Bailout Nation.

OK, it’s time for round 2, Shedlock vs. Ritholtz.

You may recall that last time, Mish & I disagreed as to whether this was a recession (Me) or a depression (He). This time, the debate is over the current rally.

On Monday this week on Yahoo Tech Ticker, I discussed that we did not see evidence that the rally was ending (see “Rally May Only Be in 6th or 7th Inning, Ritholtz Says“).

Shedlock pens a response - “Rally in 6th Inning or Top of the 12th?” - and discusses the reasons he thinks the market rally should be ending soon: “The flip side of the coin is this market has advanced so far, so

It’s a difficult question to ponder as the state of the world economy is so fragile. Right now, GDP growth stems exclusively from the government’s stimulus package. But once Obama and his cronies are finished fixing the economy, what will the fuel the next leg of the recovery?

In the near term, we think the prospects for job growth look incredibly bleak. Banks aren’t lending. Companies aren’t hiring or investing heavily in R&D, and corporate profits are up only because of cost cutting measures, like layoffs, rather than bottom line revenue growth.

In the long term, however, certain industries look primed to blossom like plastics did in the 70s and semiconductors, personal PCs, and telecom did in the 80s and 90s. Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture points out ten niche industries he thinks will fill in the gaps and push the world economy forward. Here are his top ten (listed in order

This is a guest post by Barry Ritholtz, editor of The Big Picture Blog and author of the popular book, Bailout Nation.

I am not sure what to make of this Business Week cover: It shows an ostrich, with its head buried in the ground, making the case apparently for blind optimism.

Consider the following if you want to think of this as good advice or as a contrary indicator:

• Could this cover have come out in late February or early March? • Or, does it take a 50% rally to give nerve to the editors who made this decision?

I suspect it is the latter. Hence, why this is more likely a contrary indicator than good advice.

Excerpt:

“Sure, it has been

Hat tip: Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture, August 18, 2009.

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With investors taking heart from better-than-expected earnings announcements (albeit only as a result of cost cutting negating a decline in revenue), the major US equity indices reached new highs for the year on Thursday/Friday and the S&P 500 Index closed in on the roundophobia 1,000 level.

Newsweek’s cover declared “The recession is over”, but a footnote stated “Good luck surviving the recovery”, implying a hard slog ahead.

Elsewhere, Washington hosted a US-China Strategic Dialogue, as the Chinese is increasingly focusing on America’s deficit, the value of the greenback and the implications for its Treasury holdings. After almost doubling, a mid-week sell-off in Chinese stocks raised concerns about the sustainability of the Chinese economic recovery and repercussions for the rest of the fragile global economy.

Unsurprisingly, four of the clips included in this week’s video compilation deal with Chinese -related issues. Covering these and other topical issues are David Rosenberg,

This is a guest post by Barry Ritholtz, editor of The Big Picture Blog and author of the newly released book, Bailout Nation

One of the more fascinating things about a crisis and its resolution is the post-mortems: The after-the-fact analyses that some folks do to explain what occurred.

These analyses are fascinating for what they reveal about the beliefs, methodologies, biases and cognitive failures of the many crisis watchers.

Human fallibility being what it is, we can divide this universe into 3 buckets of observers:

(1) Those who get it mostly wrong.

(2) Those who can correctly describe a small slice of what happened.

(3) Those who understand the full boom and bust - how all the moving parts came together to cause the crisis.

The first bucket is the easiest to both understand and dismiss: It contains the ideologues and market worshipers, as

You might find these interesting:

Barry Ritholtz and Robert Reich believe investors should not be pleased with recent positive corporate earnings surprises. Hal Varian reports that Google Trends predicts further reductions ahead in new claims for unemployment insurance. Felix Salmon [1], [2] describes how Larry Summers lost a billion dollars for Harvard. ExxonMobil is investing big bucks in some radical new tools for controlling carbon emissions. Lucian Bebchuk worries that the proposed Goldman Sachs compensations represent a return to a dangerously flawed incentive structure. Dave Altig has a very interesting graph showing just how pessimistic consensus estimates are about this economic recovery. And here's one of the reasons I always try to find something that doesn't come from AP as a source any time I want to link to something in the news.