The market has got to have something to be worried about. — Todd Kingsley, venerated market observer.
This is what’s happened in recent days:
This is why:
This is what you should be looking at:
A Blood Moon Over Bluebonnets: The Lunar Eclipse in Texas
Photographer Mike Mezeul II produced this composite time lapse image of the lunar eclipse over a bluebonnet field in Ennis, Texas on April 15. Mezeul photographed the eclipse in 10 minutes intervals, spending a total of seven hours in the field capturing the moon’s transitions.
“It was somewhere around 4 a.m., I was standing in the middle of this bluebonnet field, freezing my tail off,” he recalls. “I started to have doubts that the shot I had imagined wouldn’t come together. I wondered to myself, ‘what in the heck am I doing here?'”
But Mezuel pulled it off. Tuesday’s total lunar eclipse was the first in more than two years to turn the moon into a cosmic red ball, and skywatchers everywhere went out to witness the phenomenon.
For a larger better image, click here.
Is the Stock Market Getting Bubbly?
Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein argues it is. Fellow columnist Barry Ritholtz says it isn’t. Dean Baker, who’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, writes,” I’m going to come down in the middle here.” You can read Baker’s prose here.
My opinion? We’ve had a nice run.
It won’t do what it did in late 2007 and all through 2008. Our financial system is stronger. And there’s no “sub-prime mortgage” impending disaster. But…
+ Most stocks are priced strongly. There are few “bargains” — except in stocks of companies about to be taken over — not easy to pick.
+ There’s huge cash money “on the sidelines,” ready to pounce on “cheap” stocks. That provides some underpinning. But not to tech stocks, most of which are not “cheap” or popular. Momentum is allegedly dead.
+ One brightness: The activist hedgies seem to be working magic, viz Carl Icahn and Apple.
+ Even favorites with high dividend yields and low P/Es like BX are no longer popular:
NLY has bucked the downward pressure. AGNC reports this evening. Maybe the mortgage REITs are moving into the sun. Handsome dividends, if they can hold up. We’ll hear more this evening.
Jon Stewart’s Faith/Off: Passover vs. Easter. Very funny.
For the video, click here.
Harry Newton is sort of celebrating: Susan has gone off for a few days to babysit our new granddaughter, while I stay home writing, researching, mulling, playing tennis, and dreaming of…
The image comes from one of those men’s magazines I love to read.
Okay, while I object that John Stewart never sees the potential for glaring satire of Obama, Reid, Biden, and the rest of the Liberal Clown Claque. that was a very funny piece. You do know that Ishtar, a Sumerian / Babylonian love goddess like the Greek Aphrodite and the Aramean Northwestern Semitic Astarte, was often depicted with an egg (fertility) and rabbit (sex). This is way older than Christianity.