The silver market is showing signs of bullish strain and an incredible opportunity is being presented to you. I’m a staunch silver advocate and it’s time for an update right now. Silver stands to outperform gold as the long term precious metal bull market continues to unfold.The price of silver, along with gold, is kept under wraps by officials of the New York COMEX market, aka CRIMEX. The old boy network which runs CRIMEX have whipsawed the market in their desired direction for decades and profited accordingly. These actions are government sanctioned because precious metals are competition to un-backed fiat money. State mandated fiat is so weak and poorly designed that it cannot stand competitors.

I wrote a silver article 4½ years ago entitled Silver: Anatomy of A CRIME(X). In that article I compared activities at the COMEX market to prior incidents at Long Term Capital Management, Enron and Arthur

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Federal officials are discussing the possibility of converting the U.S. government’s preferred shares of Citigroup Inc. (C) to common stock in a move that would boost taxpayers’ stake in the company to 40%, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The government currently owns $45 billion in preferred Citi shares, or a 7.8% stake of the company. By converting those shares into common stock, the government would increase its stake to 40% at the expense of current shareholders, whose stock would be diluted. The move would be at no additional cost to taxpayers.

Citigroup officials would prefer the government stake be closer to 25% according to The Journal.

By converting the preferred shares into common stock, Citi would bolster its “tangible common equity,” or TCE.  The TCE is a measure of what shareholders would receive if an institution were liquidated. It is

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Traders! Investors! Message Board Trolls! Lend me your ears! I come to praise Jim Cramer, not to bury him! Mr. Cramer has had a tough 2008. It has become quite fashionable within the investment community to mock and ridicule the man. While this had been going on for some time, several of Mr. Cramer’s calls on his show “Mad Money” amplified the cries for CNBC to suspend or remove him. From his remark that Bear Sterns was “not in trouble,” to calling a market bottom this summer, to then making his panic-stricken call on October 6th to get entirely out of the market, Mr. Cramer has been under close scrutiny. While he had defenses for each of these pronouncements, the damage had already been done. Aside from his questionable market pronouncements, even his best buddy Eliot Spitzer lost his job over a Jersey Girl. ...

If you were in charge of risk management at a company that imploded due to over-leveraging, you might expect a tough time finding a new job. Not Michael Alix though. The former chief risk officer at Bear Stearns has just been hired by the Fed to advise on bank regulation. No joke.

More from Andrew Snyder at Today’s Financial News:

In one of the latest what-were-you-thinking moves, the Federal Reserve just announced it has hired Michael Alix as a bank regulation advisor.

Who the heck is Michael Alix, you ask? He is the former chief risk officer at Bear Sterns, a company that thought risk-management was an oxymoron. Essentially, he is the guy that allowed Bear Sterns to get so over-leveraged, it collapsed under its own weight.

Now, he is an advisor for the Federal Reserve. At the very least, he can tell us what not to do.

Frankly, I believe the Fed’s hiring of

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OK, a lot has happened over the last two weeks, and it is hard to know where to start. In the first place, you the taxpayer are now the proud owner of most of the mortgage finance industry in the country -- the takeover of Fannie (FNM) and Freddie (FRE)  -- and also the owner of the largest insurance company in the world, AIG (AIG) . In a bid to stem moral hazard, the shareholders of each of these firms were essentially wiped out, the bondholders however were bailed out.

Both the bondholders and the stockholders of Lehman Brothers (LEH) were effectively wiped out. This led to the original money market fund, a fund with $63 billion in it, breaking the buck and suspending redemptions for a week. This is only the second time a money market fund has broken the buck, and the last time

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So goes the title of one of Shakespeare's plays, and as I am slowly adjusting to life in Lausanne and its beautiful environnements I am forced to admit the truthfulness of this axiom. Consequently, and while I have now settled down in a nice shared apartment I feel the need to confess my readers the tremendous difficulty with which I, finally, managed to secure housing in Lausanne. I will not belabor you with details, but merely pass on my humble advice that if you are ever going to Lausanne (indeed, the entire Vaud canton!) looking for short term rental accommodations ... bring valiums or deep pockets, and preferably both!

In any case that is now well past me and to prove that I am now safely and nicely housed I have chosen to flatter this entry

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By Claus Vistesen Copenhagen

Japan is still hanging on it seems, but for how long? This is what I will try to clarify in this entry. In the following I will thus continue my ongoing analysis on two months' worth of data as well as loads of timely analysis from other sources where, as usual, Ken Worsley and Takehiro Sato/Feldman from Morgan Stanley have my complete attention. In accordance with tradition four overall themes will form the backbone of the analysis; trends in prices, domestic demand figures, industrial output/exports, and finally the JPY which as ever is the subject of much attention in currency markets and beyond.

When it comes to prices it could seem as if Japan's quick return to inflation in the core-of-core index was nothing more than a blip. As can consequently be observed from the graph below Japan is once again stuck in

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Here is a brief summary of data I collected from Yahoo Finance for companies in the Samp;P 500 Index.br /br /EPS Estimates for the current fiscal year compared to estimates 90 days ago:br /UP: 166 (33%)br /DN: 306 (62%)br /UNCH: 24 (5%)br /br /In aggregate, current year estimates were revised down 4.7%.br /The average upward revision was 4.2%br /The average downward revision was 9.9%br /br /Not much of a surprise as to which type of companies received the largest revisions: Energy amp; commodities-Up and Financials amp; consumer goods-Down.br /br /Out of the 496 companies I could find estimates for (current amp; 90 days ago), 479 have positive EPS estimates and 17 negative, up from 11 negative estimates 90 days ago.br /br /I eliminated the negative EPS companies when calculating the revisions to consensus estimates since percentage changes for negative values do not make sense. Therefore, the 9.9% figure for average ...

Author: InformedTradesAdded: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:16:18 -0800Duration: 325

http://www.informedtrades.com/trades.php?page=course3 The first video in a series on what happened to Bear Sterns, why the fed intervened, the JP Morgan and Bear Stearns deal and the debate surrounding all this.

Author: InformedTradesAdded: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:16:18 -0800Duration: 325

http://www.informedtrades.com/trades.php?page=course3 The first video in a series on what happened to Bear Sterns, why the fed intervened, the JP Morgan and Bear Stearns deal and the debate surrounding all this.