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STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 8 August 2012
[font size=3]STOCK MARKET WATCH, Wednesday, 8 August 2012[font color=black][/font]
SMW for 7 August 2012
AT THE CLOSING BELL ON 7 August 2012
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Dow Jones 13,168.60 +51.09 (0.39%)
S&P 500 1,401.35 +7.12 (0.51%)
Nasdaq 3,015.86 +25.95 (0.87%)
[font color=red]10 Year 1.63% +0.02 (1.24%)
30 Year 2.72% +0.01 (0.37%) [font color=black]
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[font size=2]Market Conditions During Trading Hours[/font]
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[font size=2]Euro, Yen, Loonie, Silver and Gold[center]
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Market Data and News:[/font][/font]
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Economic Calendar
Marketwatch Data
Bloomberg Economic News
Yahoo Finance
Google Finance
Bank Tracker
Credit Union Tracker
Daily Job Cuts
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Economic Blogs:[/font][/font]
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The Big Picture
Financial Sense
Calculated Risk
Naked Capitalism
Credit Writedowns
Brad DeLong
Bonddad
Atrios
goldmansachs666
The Stand-Up Economist
The Automatic Earth
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Government Issues:[/font][/font]
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LegitGov
Open Government
Earmark Database
USA spending.gov
[/center][font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Videos:[/font][/font]
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Charlie Rose talks with Roubini
Charlie Rose talks with Krugman
William Black: This Economic Disaster
Bill Moyers with Kevin Drum and David Corn
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[font color=red]Partial List of Financial Sector Officials Convicted since 1/20/09 [/font][font color=red]
2/2/12 David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, Credit Suisse, plead guilty to conspiracy involving valuation of MBS
3/6/12 Allen Stanford, former Caribbean billionaire and general schmuck, convicted on 13 of 14 counts in $2.2B Ponzi scheme, faces 20+ years in prison
6/4/12 Matthew Kluger, lawyer, sentenced to 12 years in prison, along with co-conspirator stock trader Garrett Bauer (9 years) and co-conspirator Kenneth Robinson (not yet sentenced) for 17 year insider trading scheme.
6/14/12 Allen Stanford sentenced to 110 years without parole.
6/15/12 Rajat Gupta, former Goldman Sachs director, found guilty of insider trading. Could face a decade in prison when sentenced later this year.
6/22/12 Timothy S. Durham, 49, former CEO of Fair Financial Company, convicted of one count conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, 10 counts of wire fraud, and one count of securities fraud.
6/22/12 James F. Cochran, 56, former chairman of the board of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and six counts of wire fraud.
6/22/12 Rick D. Snow, 48, former CFO of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and three counts of wire fraud.
7/13/12 Russell Wassendorf Sr., CEO of collapsed brokerage firm Peregrine Financial Group Inc. arrested and charged with lying to regulators after admitting to authorities he embezzled "millions of dollars" and forged bank statements for "nearly twenty years."
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[font size=3][font color=red]This thread contains opinions and observations. Individuals may post their experiences, inferences and opinions on this thread. However, it should not be construed as advice. It is unethical (and probably illegal) for financial recommendations to be given here.[/font][/font][/font color=red][font color=black]
24 replies
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/marketforceslive/2012/aug/08/standard-chartered-shares-bounce-back
Shares in Standard Chartered have bounced back by 6% this morning as the bank fighting accusations of money laundering recovered slightly from one of its worst ever one-day falls.
The group's shares plunged by 16% on Tuesday - to follow a 6% drop in the last few minutes of trading Monday - on the news that New York's State Department of Financial Services had accused the bank of laundering as much as $250bn (£161bn) for US-sanctioned Iran. The regulator also threatened to revoke Standard Chartered's banking licence.
However, Standard Chartered strenuously denied the allegations, arguing that it had already been conducting a review of its operations and had voluntarily contacted US regulators to share its findings. It also said that transactions that may have breached US rules only equated to a fraction of the $250bn outlined by the DFS.
Standard Chartered said: "The group does not believe the order issued by the DFS presents a full and accurate picture of the facts. The analysis, that the group shared with all the US agencies, demonstrates that throughout the period the group acted to comply, and overwhelmingly did comply, with US sanctions and the regulations relating to U-turn payments [that allow US banks to process payments involving Iran that begin and end with a non-Iranian foreign bank]. As we have disclosed to the authorities, well over 99.9% of the transactions relating to Iran complied with the U-turn regulations. The total value of transactions which did not follow the U-turn was under $14m".
Shares in Standard Chartered have bounced back by 6% this morning as the bank fighting accusations of money laundering recovered slightly from one of its worst ever one-day falls.
The group's shares plunged by 16% on Tuesday - to follow a 6% drop in the last few minutes of trading Monday - on the news that New York's State Department of Financial Services had accused the bank of laundering as much as $250bn (£161bn) for US-sanctioned Iran. The regulator also threatened to revoke Standard Chartered's banking licence.
However, Standard Chartered strenuously denied the allegations, arguing that it had already been conducting a review of its operations and had voluntarily contacted US regulators to share its findings. It also said that transactions that may have breached US rules only equated to a fraction of the $250bn outlined by the DFS.
Standard Chartered said: "The group does not believe the order issued by the DFS presents a full and accurate picture of the facts. The analysis, that the group shared with all the US agencies, demonstrates that throughout the period the group acted to comply, and overwhelmingly did comply, with US sanctions and the regulations relating to U-turn payments [that allow US banks to process payments involving Iran that begin and end with a non-Iranian foreign bank]. As we have disclosed to the authorities, well over 99.9% of the transactions relating to Iran complied with the U-turn regulations. The total value of transactions which did not follow the U-turn was under $14m".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/05/jason-burke-west-too-optimistic-about-india
Indian passengers wait on the platform of Sealdah train station, Kolkata, for the resumption of services during a power failure. Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
n the centre of Delhi, one of the world's biggest, dirtiest, noisiest cities, is an island of calm. Here, government ministers live in vast, state-owned villas; judges, generals and senior bureaucrats walk their dogs across well-watered lawns as servants scrub their government cars; top politicians confer in compounds and the wives of unimaginably wealthy industrialists hold lunch parties catered by top chefs. You live here and visit India.
Last week, India visited this island in the shape of a giant power cut.
Such outages are a daily occurrence for the rest of the population – or at least the two-thirds of India's 1.2bn inhabitants who actually have any electricity supply. But they are not for India's elite. For the latter, power guarantees power. The bureaucrats in charge of Delhi's grids switch off the supply to hospitals before they plunge the homes of top politicians into darkness. But this time the lights did go off. And so the residents of the most upmarket parts of the city – so confident of their power supplies that they do not have generators – had to sit in the fetid monsoon temperatures of 35 degrees like everyone else.
The north Indian outage, possibly the biggest in the history of mankind, affected an estimated 700m people. It was a global news story. It revealed the parlous state of Indian infrastructure and provided a dramatic example of how public institutions have failed to keep pace with economic growth. And it also revealed quite to what degree the conclusion, so deeply rooted in the west, that India is not only "shining" but will only get progressively shinier, is complacent in the extreme.
All things are relative and the "India Shining" slogan, coined for a marketing campaign in heady boom days almost a decade ago, can easily be justified when the current situation of the country is compared to the old days of famine, political instability, riots and disease. India's wealth, though more and more unequally distributed, has grown very substantially in the last 20 years. If the environment has suffered hugely, at the proportion of Indians living in poverty has dropped. A whole world of top-class hotels, coffee chains serving cappuccino, glitzy domestic airlines, shiny new airports, information technology companies, quality private clinics, art galleries and the odd mass urban transit system has been dropped on top of the old India and partly obscures the heat, the crowds, the filth and the misery, as well as the cultural riches, for which this extraordinarily varied country has long been known.
Indian passengers wait on the platform of Sealdah train station, Kolkata, for the resumption of services during a power failure. Photograph: Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images
n the centre of Delhi, one of the world's biggest, dirtiest, noisiest cities, is an island of calm. Here, government ministers live in vast, state-owned villas; judges, generals and senior bureaucrats walk their dogs across well-watered lawns as servants scrub their government cars; top politicians confer in compounds and the wives of unimaginably wealthy industrialists hold lunch parties catered by top chefs. You live here and visit India.
Last week, India visited this island in the shape of a giant power cut.
Such outages are a daily occurrence for the rest of the population – or at least the two-thirds of India's 1.2bn inhabitants who actually have any electricity supply. But they are not for India's elite. For the latter, power guarantees power. The bureaucrats in charge of Delhi's grids switch off the supply to hospitals before they plunge the homes of top politicians into darkness. But this time the lights did go off. And so the residents of the most upmarket parts of the city – so confident of their power supplies that they do not have generators – had to sit in the fetid monsoon temperatures of 35 degrees like everyone else.
The north Indian outage, possibly the biggest in the history of mankind, affected an estimated 700m people. It was a global news story. It revealed the parlous state of Indian infrastructure and provided a dramatic example of how public institutions have failed to keep pace with economic growth. And it also revealed quite to what degree the conclusion, so deeply rooted in the west, that India is not only "shining" but will only get progressively shinier, is complacent in the extreme.
All things are relative and the "India Shining" slogan, coined for a marketing campaign in heady boom days almost a decade ago, can easily be justified when the current situation of the country is compared to the old days of famine, political instability, riots and disease. India's wealth, though more and more unequally distributed, has grown very substantially in the last 20 years. If the environment has suffered hugely, at the proportion of Indians living in poverty has dropped. A whole world of top-class hotels, coffee chains serving cappuccino, glitzy domestic airlines, shiny new airports, information technology companies, quality private clinics, art galleries and the odd mass urban transit system has been dropped on top of the old India and partly obscures the heat, the crowds, the filth and the misery, as well as the cultural riches, for which this extraordinarily varied country has long been known.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/aug/07/standard-chartered-rogue-bank-or-victim
If Peter Sands is to survive as chief executive of Standard Chartered he needs to be vindicated in full over the Iran claims. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian
Which is it? Is Standard Chartered a "rogue institution", as the New York state department of financial services alleges? Or is the new US body a rogue regulator led by a lawyer, Benjamin Lawsky, seeking to make his name in the style of Eliot Spitzer, one-time scourge of Wall Street before his downfall?
It has to be one or the other because the positions of the two sides are miles apart. The New York DFS alleges that Standard Chartered hid $250bn (£160bn) of transactions with the Iranian government by falsifying records.
The bank maintains Lawsky is talking rubbish. It says 99.9% of the transactions disclosed to regulators complied with the rules and that the infringements involve the relatively modest sum of $14m.
Further, Standard Chartered asserts that the DFS's interpretation "is incorrect as a matter of law".
If Peter Sands is to survive as chief executive of Standard Chartered he needs to be vindicated in full over the Iran claims. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian
Which is it? Is Standard Chartered a "rogue institution", as the New York state department of financial services alleges? Or is the new US body a rogue regulator led by a lawyer, Benjamin Lawsky, seeking to make his name in the style of Eliot Spitzer, one-time scourge of Wall Street before his downfall?
It has to be one or the other because the positions of the two sides are miles apart. The New York DFS alleges that Standard Chartered hid $250bn (£160bn) of transactions with the Iranian government by falsifying records.
The bank maintains Lawsky is talking rubbish. It says 99.9% of the transactions disclosed to regulators complied with the rules and that the infringements involve the relatively modest sum of $14m.
Further, Standard Chartered asserts that the DFS's interpretation "is incorrect as a matter of law".
Bloomin' Brands IPO raises less money than expected
Times wires
Posted: Aug 08, 2012 11:21 AM
Early reports indicate that the initial public offering for Bloomin' Brands did not raise as much money as initially expected.
Bloomin' Brands, formerly OSI, sold 40 percent fewer shares than expected and priced it 15 percent below the low end of its expected range, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News reported.
The offering wound up pricing at $11, raising just $176 million. The previous high-end of its range could have created a $315 million IPO. Shares rose $1.19, or 10.8 percent, to $12.18 in early trading today.
Bloomin' Brands, the Tampa-based parent of Outback Steakhouse, Carrabba's Italian Grill, Bonefish Grill and other chains, operates more than 1,400 restaurants in 48 states and 20 countries.
(snip)
The offering comes amid a rush of restaurant IPOs, and Bloomin' Brands' offerings fit right in the middle of the previous two offerings, low-budget Mexican chain Chuy's Holdings which jumped 16 percent on its debut and is now up 47 percent, and New York's expensive steak house Del Frisco's Restaurant Group, which was flat.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/article1244796.ece
