News Corp. (NWS) recently reported its first quarter results. Earnings of 22 cents a share surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 17 cents and climbed 10% from 20 cents posted in the prior-year quarter.   Total revenues tumbled 4.1% year on year to $7,199 million due to fall in Television (down 7.7%), Direct Broadcast Satellite Television (down 4.3%), Newspapers and Information Services (down 17.7%), Book Publishing (down 1.6%) and Other (down 44.4%) segments, offset by rise in Filmed Entertainment (up 20.8%), Cable Network Programming (up 10.5%) and Integrated Marketing Services (up 3.1%) segments.   However, significant cost-cutting initiatives taken by management and robust performance at Filmed Entertainment and Cable Network Programming segments have boosted the operating income by 9.3% to $1,042 million. Management expects fiscal 2010 operating income to increase within a high-single digit to low double-digit percentage range.   Filmed Entertainment posted a record first quarter operating ...

The longer the rally persists, the more dangerous it becomes.

The S&P 500 is up almost 60% since March. The Dow just had its best quarter since ’98.

Yesterday, the Dow slipped 29 points. Is the rally finally rolling over? Or is this a genuine bull market, just taking a pause?

If it is a real bull market it’s a funny-looking bull – one that is missing parts!

For example, corporate earnings are missing. P/E ratios are rising far above the corporate earnings that support them. This puts the market 35% overvalued on a cyclically-adjusted P/E basis, says Smithers & Co.

And if you look at it in terms of its “q” ratio – a comparison of capitalisation and replacement costs – the S&P is even more overvalued. As for emerging markets, “they’re off the charts,” says the Financial Times.

Another missing part is the consumer. This from David Rosenberg:

“ Consumer confidence not only

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As traditional print media continues its steep declines in advertising sales and circulation, publishers are struggling to come up with new and creative ways to generate revenue.

Ad revenues in the newspaper industry plunged 16.7% last year to $37.8 million r, according to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). The 2009 take is estimated to fall another 17.3% to $31.6 billion according to Alan Mutter, a Silicon Valley executive who once lead the newsrooms of the Chicago Sun-Times and San Francisco Chronicle and now writes a blog titled “Reflections of a Newsosaur.”

Mutter’s estimate would put ad revenues at their lowest levels since 1965, when the industry took in $4.42 billion, or $30.22 billion when adjusted for inflation, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) reported.

While the worst economic downturn since World War II has eviscerated the fortunes of print media companies like The New York Times Co. (NYSE:

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

• John Hussman (Hussman Funds): Conditional expectations and September seasonality, September 14, 2009. One of the arguments we’ve seen a lot lately is the idea that September and October have historically been the worst months for the stock market, coupled with rebuttals by bullish analysts along the lines that the discussion of this historical tendency by the bears makes it likely that nothing bad will happen this time. The fact is that yes, on average, the combined September-October period has historically produced slight declines for the S&P 500 whether you look back since 1870, 1900, 1940 or 1970. But the variance around that slightly negative return is large enough that it’s really misguided, in my view, to base predictions on it.

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U.S. stocks recovered from early losses to end the day slightly higher, helped by a rebound in energy, financial and technology shares.  Volume was extremely light as investors, lacking in enthusiasm, refrained from taking big positions. 

The Dow Jones industrial average, which at one point had given up as much as 84 points, rose 37.11 points, or 0.4%, to close at 9,580.63, its eighth consecutive advance.  The broad Standard & Poor's 500-stock index rose 2.86 points, or 0.28%, to 1,030.98.  The tech-heavy NASDAQ composite index edged up 3.30 points, or 0.16%, to 2,027.73, helped by a late-session rally in technology shares.  Treasuries fell, pushing the yield on 10-year notes up 0.3 point to 3.46%.  On the New York Stock Exchange 1.16 billion shares exchanged hands and advancing shares were ahead of those that declined eight to seven.

This morning’s stock futures suggest moderate gains on the opening.  Dow Jones

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Tuesday trading in gold turned into a pretty big bear raid. As I mentioned briefly in my rant yesterday…starting shortly after Sydney opened on Tuesday morning…someone bombed the bullion market with a big sell order. The word ‘big’ is relative in this case. In the extremely thin trading that characterizes Far East gold and silver activity…a 1,000 contract sell order would hammer the market…and that’s pretty much what happened in gold. Ditto for silver.

Anyway, after the Sydney pounding [courtesy of the U.S. bullion banks out of N.Y. one would think], gold didn’t stray far away from $897…and was within a whisker of that price when trading began on the NYMEX/COMEX at around 8:20 a.m. in New York. Then it was lights out. A vertical decline like that can only occur if there is huge selling volume into a no-bid market…i.e. the traders for the bullion banks stand there with folded

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Starting around 2:00 p.m. in Hong Kong on Wednesday afternoon [1:00 a.m. Eastern Time], and following the sun as the London and New York bullion markets opened and closed, gold managed to add about $11 by 11:00 a.m. in Hong Kong…about 20 hours later on Thursday morning. Silver, following much the same pattern as gold, added 47 cents during the same period of time.

Estimated gold volume totaled 67,299 lots…which included 10,239 switches…as traders rolled over their May contracts into June and other months, rather than stand for delivery on April 30th. This same process is occurring in silver as well. Options expiry on the Comex [in both gold and silver] is tomorrow.

I was not impressed by the fact that the gold shares didn’t hold their gains in the last hour of trading as the Dow sold off. I don’t know if there’s anything to be read into that or not.

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I thought that I had a pretty good handle on how much “stimulus” money Congress and the Fed have spent so far, ranging, as it does, in the zillions of dollars…

So I was taken aback when Addison Wiggin of Agora Financial wrote, “$7.2 trillion is a lot of money. That’s what D.C. has poured into ‘our’ bailout so far.” Wow!

Trying to keep from peeing my pants in horror, I think to myself, “Hell yeah, that’s a lot of money… Because it is roughly half of everything this country makes in a year! Half of American GDP!” which, unfortunately, ended in “P”, which sounds like “pee”, which was just enough of a subliminal suggestion that… Well, never mind.

But if creating that much money is not enough to scare the piss out of you, too, then consider it just a Mogambo Warm-Up Test (MWUT) to see if

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Bank of America (BAC) and Citigroup (C) have been actively buying toxic mortgage assets, according to the New York Post. And they are placing higher bids than other would-be buyers.

That's right, these beleaguered banks are buying the very types of assets that are plaguing their balance sheets.

Much of the distressed debt has not been selling because nobody knows how to value it. Furthermore, the major banks are fearful that if they sell the toxic assets in the open market, they will be forced to take additional, large write-offs. Such write-offs would adversely effect the various ratios used to measure their financial health.

Why are BAC and C doing this? A spokesman for BAC told the newspaper that they are trying to "increase liquidity in the mortgage market

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It was no surprise to me to see gold and silver get sold off the moment that Globex trading began in New York at 6:00 p.m. Wednesday night. Sydney and Hong Kong both open for Thursday morning trading shortly after that, and this gives New York the opportunity to set the tone for trading in the Far East if they wish to do so. The Far East is not a big market [Don't forget that 90%+ of all gold and silver trading volume is during Comex hours in New York] and it can be shoved around quite easily, as volume is never very heavy. Note the bottom of the Kitco graph [below] where it shows the times that various world gold markets are open.

Carefully note that the New York-based U.S. bullion banks can enter the global market for 23 hours and 15 minutes every day…not just in the Far

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