This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Robert Reich (Robert Reich’s Blog): The great disconnect between stocks and jobs, November 18, 2009. How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise. Where is this heading? No place good. Without a major shift in policy - both at the Fed and in the White House - the economics point to a big stock-market correction and a double dip. The politics point to substantial losses for Democrats

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This post provides links to a number of interesting articles I have read over the past few days that you may also enjoy.

• Robert Reich (Robert Reich’s Blog): The great disconnect between stocks and jobs, November 18, 2009. How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise. Where is this heading? No place good. Without a major shift in policy - both at the Fed and in the White House - the economics point to a big stock-market correction and a double dip. The politics point to substantial losses for Democrats

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Dan Holland has just interviewed Wall Street chronicler Charlie Gasparino’s. The first few paragraphs of the interview that appeared on RealClearMarkets are published below.

There’s good reason to believe that Gasparino’s latest book, The Sellout, will become the definitive book on the current financial crisis and the events that led up to “The Great Recession.” Spanning three decades, The Sellout pulls no punches in chronicling the rise and fall of excessive Wall Street leverage and risk taking, as well as the cast of colorful characters that ultimately brought the US financial system to its knees. It will hit bookshelves tomorrow [Tuesday].

RealClearMarkets: You sat down recently with Wall Street legend Teddy Forstmann to discuss your new book and the genesis of the mess we now find ourselves in. Forstmann said it all began as a “cold” back in the 1970s and 1980s, and that since

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In a report released last week, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli estimated that the securities industry granted its employees $18.4 billion in bonuses – a revelation that President Barack Obama characterized as “shameful.”

Not surprisingly, the audacity of The Street’s greed is far more shameful than people realize, because the total payout was actually much higher than the report found.

What wasn’t widely reported is that the $18.4 billion was only the cash portion of the bonus payout and only accounted for the money paid to securities-industry employees who worked in New York City. In other words, bonuses paid to employees working outside the city weren’t included. The Comptroller’s estimates also didn’t include stock options that have not been exercised, but that could easily increase the value of the bonus-related compensation by as much …

HIDDEN VALUE

Dear Value Seeker,

It could almost be comical… if our financial futures were not at stake.

Today, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke about the economic crisis and the government’s policy response.

After defending the Fed’s policies over the last 18 months, ‘Helicopter Ben’ made it clear that he isn’t about to be upstaged by Obama’s mega stimulus plan.

In my view, however, fiscal actions are unlikely to promote a lasting recovery unless they are accompanied by strong measures to further stabilize and strengthen the financial system…

More capital injections and guarantees may become necessary to ensure stability and the normalization of credit markets. A continuing barrier to private investment in financial institutions is the large quantity of troubled, hard-to-value assets that remain on institutions’ balance sheets. The presence

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Who can honestly say he isn’t enjoying this financial crisis? It has unhorsed cavalier fund managers …it has turned the masters of the universe into servile waiters…it has made Nobel Prize winners look like morons. The rich…the proud… the pompous…the vain…the incompetent…Wall Street - surely there is a God…an ‘invisible hand’…giving them all a whack on the head!

And there are the regulators too! Under their very noses the biggest scams in history went unnoticed. America’s SEC alone - to say nothing of the countless other cops on the financial beat - had 3,371 employees playing the piano in 2006. If you can believe it, not a single one of them noticed what was going on in the back room. Even after rummaging through Bernard Madoff’s back office twice in the last three years, they still didn’t know. They must have been like pets watching an orgy…with no idea what to

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Remember how rosy things looked yesterday morning, with the market shaking off bad economic news?nbsp; Well, that faded in the afternoon, and today, just rotten economic news is giving the markt its lumps. And yet gold is down despitenbsp;an apparent weakening trendnbsp;in the U.S. dollar. Look at a chart of the dollar ...brbrbrimg style=WIDTH: 490px alt= src=http://local.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/7e88b461-578b-47f3-88ec-038e212ad053/aa0ff38d-9bb9-44a5-bba5-8be30d8f6977/dollar.png _height=75 _width=75Maybe the dollar will be able to go higher, but it doesn't look good. So why is gold weaker? I talkeed to a Chicago broker about this late yesterday. He says too many speculators have been burned, and gold buyers are on strike until they get lower prices.brbrMeanwhile, the outlook for the U.S. consumer is awful. Here is a chart for Red-Hot Commodity ETFs subscribers ...brimg style=WIDTH: 490px alt= src=http://local.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/7e88b461-578b-47f3-88ec-038e212ad053/aa0ff38d-9bb9-44a5-bba5-8be30d8f6977/scc.png _height=75 _width=75This is a good area for a bounce in the SCC, and the fundamentals for consumers continue to be dismal.brbrSTRONGHere is ...

Remember how rosy things looked yesterday morning, with the market shaking off bad economic news?nbsp; Well, that faded in the afternoon, and today, just rotten economic news is giving the markt its lumps. And yet gold is down despitenbsp;an apparent weakening trendnbsp;in the U.S. dollar. Look at a chart of the dollar ...brbrbrimg style=WIDTH: 490px alt= src=http://local.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/7e88b461-578b-47f3-88ec-038e212ad053/aa0ff38d-9bb9-44a5-bba5-8be30d8f6977/dollar.png _height=75 _width=75Maybe the dollar will be able to go higher, but it doesn't look good. So why is gold weaker? I talkeed to a Chicago broker about this late yesterday. He says too many speculators have been burned, and gold buyers are on strike until they get lower prices.brbrMeanwhile, the outlook for the U.S. consumer is awful. Here is a chart for Red-Hot Commodity ETFs subscribers ...brimg style=WIDTH: 490px alt= src=http://local.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/7e88b461-578b-47f3-88ec-038e212ad053/aa0ff38d-9bb9-44a5-bba5-8be30d8f6977/scc.png _height=75 _width=75This is a good area for a bounce in the SCC, and the fundamentals for consumers continue to be dismal.brbrSTRONGHere is ...

In mid May I wrote a post about selling my Citigroup shares to Sears Holdings (SHLD) Chairman and ESL leader Eddie Lampert.

In it I lamented the fact that I was thinking along the same lines as Lampert but did not stick to my guns and bailed on Citi (C) shares at the same time Lampert was buying them. I vowed not to make the same mistake again and re-entered my Citi position.

Much like a large ocean liner turns slowly, Citigroup’s (C) size determines that a turnaround at the banking giant will not be immediate.