Doug Kass wrote up his list of a href="http://www.thestreet.com/story/10455209/1/kass-20-surprises-for-2009.html"20 surprises/a in 2009 for theStreet.com. Included in the list is the following;br /br /b/bblockquoteb11. State and municipal imbalances and deficits mushroom./b The municipal bond market seizes up in the face of poor fiscal management, revenue shortfalls and rising budgets at state and local levels. Municipal bond yields spike higher. A new Municipal TARP totaling $2 trillion is introduced in the year's second half./blockquotebr /br /I don't know about any muni Tarp but I have written a couple of posts expressing concern about going into this area. Many people in print and on TV are extolling the space for the yields available. I take the yields as a warning of something coming. There is some stat out there, I think I saw it on Barry's site a while back, about 31 states either having a deficit or soon to have a deficit.br ...

a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZckZ-8naz0/SVFA2qfLpbI/AAAAAAAACQo/R-tHu9BiY8U/s1600-h/festivus.jpg"img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 289px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZckZ-8naz0/SVFA2qfLpbI/AAAAAAAACQo/R-tHu9BiY8U/s400/festivus.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283075145744491954" border="0" //aWisdomTree announced its dividends and by and large they look pretty robust. They have had an issue with new assets coming in during the year and creating more shares to spread the dividends around to.br /br /In a down 40% year it makes sense that as the year ends there are not a lot of newly created shares in existence to collect the dividend. As a result the dividends of the funds are now in line with the indicated yields of the indexes that underlie the funds.br /br /Other news from WisdomTree is that going forward a lot of their funds that had been paying annually will be paying quarterly. This stands to reduce the impact of the effect of share creations mentioned above but it should ...

First, AIG - the huge insurer just blew a massive tire, announcing a $8 billion writeoff - and another capital raise, which again dilutes current shareholders and means earnings PER share is going to be punished for years to come. But really it's all good - whats $8 billion among friends - and it's all priced in (oops, not so much, down 8% after hours, but maybe by tomorrow morning after CNBC announces it's a good thing it will be up). What I want you to do now is close your eyes and imagine Uncle Ben B as a short order cook. He is now ringing that bell over his head and shouting over to the other minion cooks - "got a fresh order, let's get up some more billions of US pesos pronto, print 'er up!" More paper currency ...