Bankruptcies, Depressions and Mark Stanford with his Argentine beauty.

Everything is working out just like we thought it would. The stock market is performing as expected. The economy is on track. Even the politicians are doing what they thought they would.

Let’s begin with the stimulus/bailout/boondoggle/BS plan. As anticipated, it has failed. That is, the economy is getting worse, not better. It has failed the test set for it by its own creators. Back when the Obama Team was arguing for a big bailout bill, it warned that without a bailout unemployment would rise above 8% in 2009. ‘Pass this bill today,’ said Ben Bernanke, or words to that effect, ‘or there may not be a tomorrow for the US economy.’

Congress dutifully bent its back to the task of adding boondoggles to the bill and then okayed the measure. And here we are in the middle of 2009 and the unemployment rate

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Despite rising Treasury Note yields, US stock markets yesterday closed at their highest level for 2009. Also, commodities were driven higher by reports indicating that the recession is abating, but the US dollar retreated on concerns of the huge issuance of government bonds.

Elsewhere, Chrysler completed its deal with Fiat, the US Treasury Department announced that ten banks would repay TARP funds, and the Obama administration is dropping its plan to cap salaries at firms receiving bailout funds and has backed away from a large-scale reduction in the number of agencies overseeing financial markets.

Coverage of these events on camera this week included discussions with John Hussman, Chris Whalen, Peter Peterson, Paul Krugman, Mohamed El-Erian, Laszlo Birinyi, Jim Rogers, Jim Grant and Francisco Blanch.

The selection kicks off with the highly regarded John Hussman sharing his wisdom and concludes with an interesting snippet on Africa as an investment destination.

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HIDDEN VALUE

If Crude oil Breaks Through $53, It’s a Screaming Buy

Dear Value Seeker,

America’s job losses have come into sharp focus again today.

The New York Times calls it a “rising tide.” It’s more like a tsunami…

Initial jobless claims for the week ended January 17 shot up by 62,000 to 589,000. This is the highest weekly rise in unemployment since November 1982.

Meanwhile, Microsoft ensured an abrupt reversal of yesterday’s stock market rally by warning that it was “not immune” to the recession.

The tech giant also announced it would give 5,000 workers their marching orders, including 1,400 today.

Microsoft joins a long and growing list of blue chips that have announced job cuts in 2009.

It’s a list The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics blog is tracking:

Company name Date of announcement...

Following an historic election, we take a moment to examine just what an Obama presidency will mean to the United States - what we have to look forward to, and how he will deal with our current financial crisis. And according Jim Davidson, some of the numbers just don’t add up.

One of Obama’s prime campaign planks has been his promise to mercilessly raise taxes on the “rich,” a group initially defined as those making more than $250,000 per year. This was later dropped to $200,000 per year, and more recently has been defined as those Americans making more than $150,000 annually.

Setting aside the precipitous downward slide in the definition of “rich,” there is ample reason to suspect that Obama’s tax changes portend much higher, if not confiscatory, taxes on the most productive Americans. Obama has strongly argued for higher taxes as a way of employing government to alter the

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Yesterday I came across three different articles that I thought all tied to a similar theme about whether we should or should not rely on the idea of stock prices going up over the very long term. There were also comments on the blog this weekend along the same lines.Regardless of what the futures holds, asking these types of questions has become much more popular because the S&P 500 is 18% lower than where it was exactly ten years ago and the world is in the middle of a financial crisis that has yet to be sorted out.The first article was by Felix Salmon that makes a case for reorienting expectations toward dividends rather than capital gains.The second article is from David Leonhardt about why prosperity is not an unalienable right.The last one was ...

“Better to miss the first 20% of a bull market than try to time the bottom.” Amen to that. Yesterday, the Dow climbed 432 points. There are signs the credit markets are “loosening,” says BusinessWeek. And Fed head Ben Bernanke has called for another stimulus package. Could this be the bottom of the bear? Absolutely. Then again…

– The S&P 500 has moved up or down at least 1% in 10 of October’s 13 trading sessions. The record for these kind of swings was set in 1929.

– According to Infectious Greed blogger Paul Kederovsky, “The Dow is now up almost 20% from its lows of a little more than a week ago, and the S&P isn’t far behind.” He remains convinced that we “end up churning away for months as the market tries to figure out how bad this downturn is

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