No new suspects have emerged into twenty-four hours to claim the title of Patient Zero from the world famous and popular 5 year-old Edgar Hernandez of La Gloria, Veracruz State, Mexico. The Bangladeshi/Pakistani brothers of yesterday's new cycle, as asserted by the chief epidemiologist of Mexico, Dr. Lezana, are gone or at least not reintroduced with names, dates, photos and medical histories. Three hundred American schools now shut temporarily in precation as of late in the day and certain to be more by the weekend. 

Patient Zero is a critical fact. Smithfield Foods of Virginia continues as of this moment to deny it was the one million pigs it owns at it La Gloria area CAFO. No results from fields tests on the pigs at LA Gloria. However pigs as far afield as Belarus (left) are being vaccinated against H1N1 -- though there are no known cases of A/H1N1 in Belarus. In Egypt, the Mubarak regime ordered the swine herds slaughtered, to the fevered protests of the Coptic Christian pig farmers (left).

Jacob Goldstein, WSJ, was the live bloggger for the WHO teleconference from 4 pm et to 457 pm et. The critical development was that the WHO (Director General Margaret Chan) has raised the worldwide pandemic alert level from Phase 4 to Phase 5. What does this mean?  "Going from phase 3 to phase 4 meant sustained human-to-human transmission. Five means we are early in the process of spreading from country to country. Phase six can mean we're later in that process of spreading to other countries."  This requires translation from opaque apparatchik speak. Phase 5 means "human-to-human contact" into at last two countries in one region. This has been true since Sunday 26, and so WHO is moving purposefully sluggishly. Phase 6 means "global pandemic with widespread outbreaks." This is also true right now -- though it does hinge upon the definition of the word "widespread."  It seems critical to note that there is no Phase 7. The puzzle remains why does the H1N1 appear much more severe in Mexico than elsewhere?   Time?  If this was war-fighting, it is time to come out of the bunkers and attack.  Establish thermal imaging at the airports connecting out of Mexico and the American Southwest, quarantine the exposed when practical, provide the anti-viral Tamiflu to all medical personnel (vectors for infection), close the likely exposed universities, schools, restaurants and movie theaters for a week at a time, discourage pork products.  I am describing Mexico City with a Singapore bonus.  At this rate, it could be San Diego, El Paso and San Antonio soon. It also seems significant to note that, following my colleague Henry Miller's teaching, there is no vaccine for this outbreak of A/H1N1 and not likely to be one for an indefinite future.  To my reading we cannot know if the Spanish fu of 1917-1918, also an A/H1N1, started in a similar slow smouldering fire and only later exploded.

Jaw-dropping and endearing, the fresh, attractive, ambitious and note-challenged Michele Bachmann, 6th Minnesota, is momentarily the lightest moment of the day. Hoot Smalley. Ya can't make this stuff up. The untangling here requires too many footnotes. A start is that the Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley (left) tariff bill passed the Senate and was signed into law in June 1930, during the Herbert Hoover administration. I make too many errors each day to gloat. Any 55 seconds that can gather Coolidge, Hoover and FDR into a policy argument between then and now are a worthwhile 55 seconds. MB gets a green star for trying. The smarty-pants who snicker at T P M get a Need Improvement.  Leave Wiki and try this stuff on an open mic. When I can finish a show by only make ten howler mistakes I count it a good night.  How many states did the candidate visit?  You get the picture.   Show biz. 

Calculated Risk's resident capitalism philosopher, the low-key and Sam Clemens rich Jim the Realtor, displays another trenchant episode in the long playing tale of capitalism. You pay your money, you take your risk. Jim displays a plain, one-level ranch house in the working class town of Oceanside, California in San Diego County.  The house is just south of the feverish and vast Camp Pendleton; there is much demand for short term rentals and medium term ownership.  Jim's obtuse remarks at the close hint that there is class, tribe and security friction in the area, and this makes flipping a chance that can crash.  The capitalist bought this house for $163k in January 2009, put in $40k work and fixtures, flipped it for $265k in April.  Annualized profit at 100%.  Capitalism works if and when the aimless, clumsy Federal government, toying with the tax money of our grandchildren, ceases propping up zombie prices that devolve to deathless banks for the benefit of vanished pirates.  

The Republican Party in Pennsylvania is "deeply disappointed."  So says Chairman Rob Gleason from Harrisburg. "Senator Specter can rest assured that we are committed to winning this seat back for the Republican Party in 2010. I am confident that we will win this seat back." Tree. Forest. No one.  Falls.  Hears.  The Democratic caucus in the Senate can hear sixty votes.  It sounds like,  "... victory."  Who lost Pennsylvania?  More soon, after the laughter dies and the geniuses who read copy on TV cease prattling.

Arlen Specter goes over to the new Tsar. The senator has been warning on this maneuver at least since he challenged Dick Cheney and George Bush in 2007 on war-making powers (above). Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and John McCain are watching with cunning interest. The Grand Army retreat from Moscow 1812 was much colder and more ghastly than the Grand Old Party retreat from Washington 2009. Still at the end, the people did get to drive Bonaparte from the palace . He flared again; no matter. When do the Republican voters get to drive the disgraced and defeated Republican leaders from the Hill?  Do they go now or do we drive them out with laughter? Put a powdered wig and leg stockings on Mitch McConnell and Judd Gregg and Dick Shelby, and you have the world's most undead Tories waving their useless pistoles at the mob that's coming for them. Smell the tar! Get up those chicken feathers the old-fashioned way!

The Air Force explanations do not satisfy that three low-flying AF assets, two of them F-16 fighters along with a large VC-25 resembling the 747 that is AF1, were sent looping over lower Manhattan in the vicinity of the Goldman Sachs tower on a "photo op." The Air Force also asserts that its conduct was approved by the FAA. Swift-thinking traders on the New York Mercantile Exchange took a glance at the aircraft in the fresh 10 am et skies and exited the building. No reports from the Goldman Sachs tower. Another puzzling detail is that the photo op was associated with the Presidential Airlift Group, the outfit that operates Air Force One.   The photos sent from observers (left) certainly do identify an aircraft that looks like AF1.  There are two of them. The FAA spokesperson was nonchalant, "...two or three spins." The Port Authority said that it had no knowledge of the event. Add all these clues together and you do not find wisdom. When a low-flying private plane entered DC air space last Friday, the White House was evacuated. Now, when low-flying combat aircraft enter Manhattan air space and loiter over Wall Street and the Goldman Sachs tower, the Air Force says, "The mission was coordinated..." Awaiting the gallows humor from the traders. Recon for the next TARP negotiation? "Take this cash or we bomb you with billions!"   As for the Goldman Sachs tower -- the threat would be more old-fashioned war-making.  How much authority does Generalissimo Tim Geithner possess here?

In contrast to the Obama administration, the WHO has put out an alarming all points alert to all countries to prepare for a pandemic. Travel warnings for Mexico, screening of incoming planes at Asia airports, distribution of surgical masks at terminals, and additional planning. Mexico City is said to be closed for business; and Mexico President Calderon in shirtsleeves is vivid, engaged, and clearly challenged by the scale of the alarm. New Zealand is reporting ten possible cases of students returning from Mexico. New York City has closed a high school with eight suspect cases of students returned from Mexico. The WHO does not project coolness and preparedness. Instead, sweaty mobilization time, lots of bulletins, every nation for itself, stay alert for updates, no one sleeps much, wash your hands.

Tim Geithner's Treasury Department's long awaited and much debated stress tests are due to be announced in some fashion in one week, on May 4. The results are already in, and the leaks will start with trading on Monday 27.  Above is a spirited cross-talking exchange on Charlie Rose between economist Joseph Stiglitz (bearded), Pershing Square trader Bill Ackman (purple tie), and NYT journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin.  They are in rough agreement that the Geithner Treasury PPIP plan to rescue the banks by pricing and off-loading the junk is neither certain nor credible.  Why?  The banks cannot admit to what their junk is worth because then the banks are either insolvent or make Humpty-Dumpty look sound, even urbane, resiliant, trustworthy .  Ackman:  "...what I can tell you is that toxic assets are trading in the billions of dollars everyday... it's not a business we particularly invest in, but they're encouraging us to participate..."  Rose: "On the basis of that trading, should you be able to determine (what they are worth)..."  Sorkin: "Yes, and the price then becomes too low for the bank to accept..."  Stiglitz: "... and we've made it worse recently because we allow the banks to keep it at a higher value... and we've reduced transparency, changed the rules in some sense.  We've reduced their incentives to sell these assets on the market..."  Does Treasury know of this widespread, well-explicated, tradeable doubt?  Yes.

Fresh reports from Mexico City are consistent with a major viral flu that is linked with swine flu and avian flu and human flu.  We are told that the identification of a "new virus" type came late in the day Thursday April 23.  This may be the long feared new killer.  Late Saturday 25, Mexico's President Calderone has now declared an emergency to give him extraordinary powers to order quarantines.  The outbreak is not yet declared a pandemic by WHO, though it is said to demonstrate "pandemic potential."  The mortality numbers so far from Mexico, and they are surely old numbers, are 68 dead and one thousand infected.  Henry Miller, Hoover Institution, sent me an alert on this development on Tuesday 21.  "...adjacent southern California counties ...two cases of febrile respiratory illiness... caused by infection with a swine influenza A (H1N1) virus... contain a unique combination of gene segments..."  Henry Miller has explicated for years the likely progress of a flu  pandemic, such as avian flu, H5N1.  Henry's projected scenario looks much like the early reports of this outbreak, a new type of virus associated with pigs, birds and humans. There are reports of new swine flu cases in the San Diego area and the San Antonio areas.  The freshest reports indicate at least eight students in a New York City high school are infected.  This is strong evidence that the flu has spread to non contiguous locations and is no longer containable in Mexico City by screening the airports and transportation terminals.  As of late Saturday 25 April, East Coast time, there are no U.S. Homeland Security travel restrictions or border closings.  The White House wants us to know that POTUS is watching the developments through the reports of CDC, State and Homeland Security.

StateSec HRC sudden visit to Baghdad is a strong indication that the Obama administration has decided to wade into the quagmire of the Ummah with all feet.  The grasp of the forearm of super soldier Mike Mullen (left) is State taking command from Defense.  No more hesitation.  Immediately illustrate that HRC is greeted by her opposite number, humble Shia tool Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. (NB: The comprehensive Bill Roggio writes that Zebari, who is a Kurd, is also a decent politician, regardless that he works for the Shia-dominant government.)  Soonafter, HRC announced that the enemy in Iraq is the "rejectionists" of the old, dead, hanged, really stinky Saddam Hussein regime. HRC declared that the recent massive shahid ops are "in an unfortunately tragic way, a signal that the rejectionists fear that Iraq is going in the right direction." These gangsters used to be called Baathists, and then SecDef Don Rumsfeld called them "dead-enders." For several years, the DoD referred to the enemy as the insurgents. Now we are to call them the rejectionists. Tehran by any name would smell the same as cordite. The Bush administration maintained the fiction that they insurgents were located in Anbar and Bagdad province, and that it was abetted by the shadowy Al Qaeda in Iraq. This loopy explanation did not account for all the captured arms, ops, and intelligence that originated in Tehran, nor did it explain the Mahdi army in Basra, nor the staging out of Damascus, but it did get the media to go along with using the word insurgency rather than mentioning the Twelvers. Now the Obama administration will play Iraq exactly the same way, 1984 style. War is peace.  2+2=5. The enemy is Goldstein, or the Eurasians, or the Rejectionists.  Launch exercise:  Tehran is a partner for peace.  Let the diplomacy begin. Make certain Mike Mullen and staff appear sans helmet and armor.  Maintain the heavily armored motorcade at 50 mph.  Roll peace-cam.

StateSec HRC is offered a Mars-sized hanging curve ball, and she puts it over right center. Old rule is that when the story is big enough, such as the Torture Memos, then all stories become one. Dick Cheney is a genius at self-promotion; and the treat is that he might believe his own dragon-fumes. By asking for secret documents on torture while writing the first of his memoirs, Dick Cheney has found a way to make his book Number 1 worldwide, and it doesn't exist. HRC is a genius at the counter-punch. Asked by the ill-dressed California palaver purveyor Dana Rohrbacher for her thoughts on Dick Cheney's self-promotion tour, HRC responds so magnificently it appears scripted and rehearsed, "...I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information."   No use of the name or title.  Just "him."  HRC delivers this with a half-smile and a long flutter of her eyelids.  She then immediately stops talking. The laughter in the background is her success. Dana Rohrbacher behaves poorly in response, mouth open, waving his sharpened pencil with his right hand finger tips, baritone unmodulated and with too much volume. (Hint: Do not wave a sharp object at a lady who can hit the long ball.)  HRC responds comfortably, "Well, Congressman, I believe we ought to get to the bottom of this entire matter. It's in the best interest of our country, and that is what the President believes, and that is why he has taken the actions he did." And then she stops talking. Time expired. Another star soprano performance. The Obama administration at the Met. The first act is mesmerizing.

Is it a coincidence that Joe Lieberman of Connecticut opens fire on the Torture Memos imbroglio at the same time as Dick Cheney? No. Both unchained pols were given a free shot by the POTUS trip to the CIA yesterday in order to explain, explain, explain the release of the memos. The Obama administration has created a problem where a problem didn't exist. POTUS was not elected to clean up or otherwise rehash the Bush administration. POTUS was elected to clean up and rehash his own administration. Why did the Obama administration pick this fight? Naive? Nah. The Left? Nah. Aggression? Yes. This can only be part of the overall theme to seek peace with the Ummah. The memos are not about torturing criminals. They are about torturing jihadists. Now the Obama administration has a fight with the political apparatus that remains at war with the jihadists. Who will win? The Obama team. For now. CIA author Bob Baer on TV via Skye (left) added a caveat. "...if we're attacked again, this president is going to be faced with the same decision, do we use abusive interrogation techniques?..."

There was a well-turned theater piece from the dreary Durban II confab at Geneva when a couple of French clowns shouted and danced during the routine rude remarks of Twelver faceman M. Ahmadinejad. What is fresh here is the hair-do of rainbow colors. It could be a mischievous fad. The Twelvers are not pleased when they are mocked. Protest puffs them up and makes them feel menacing, but farce is too close to their self-doubt of being ridiculous and marginal to history.  Ahmadinejad's remarks were unmemorable; he e-mailed in his speech.  I will have a full report of the episodes from Claudia Rosett, Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, when she returns from Geneva.  There is the irony that POTUS Obama and StateSec HRC are disappointed in Ahmadinejad's remarks.  Disappointment may be the Obama administration's longest range weapons system -- as in, "Holocaust-denying is disappointing," or "stocking and arming Hizballah camps in Venezuela under the Chavez regime is disappointing."

The POTUS visit to the CIA HQ this news cycle is mysterious. The case is presented that the White House decision to release the so-called Torture Memos, over the counsel of former DCIs (left, Mike Hayden of the Bush administration) and even the present DCI, Leon Panetta, has caused a rift that the POTUS seeks to heal. This is the facile argument. The POTUS does not need to visit Langley, Virginia to make the CIA like him. The POTUS does not need to go to the CIA at all. There is a super spook administrator, the DNI, Dennis Blair, whose job description includes supervising and corraling the seventeen or so institutions that make up US intelligence gathering. Bypassing the merits and demerits of the Obama adminstration squabble over the Torture Memos, why is the POTUS not delegating the embassy duty to Blair? My best guess is that the White House is anxious that it made a political decision for short-term gain, the memos, and later realized that it had created a fresh problem that didn't exist before.  This would explain the defensiveness in the faces of David Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel as they took to the Sunday coffee hours on TV to explain, explain, explain.    The problem? The spooks don't trust the Obama administration. This was a big issue for the Carter administration. There are anecdotes of fist-fights at the DoD and CIA over Carter policies of what at the time were called timid, even defeatist, thinking. Too early for the Obama administration to worry about defeatism. But still. The POTUS visit is not the conduct of a confident administration.

Just in case the Tehran regime began to look like a patsy for tough love, the Twelvers have arrested and tried and now condemned a totally innocent and crusading journalist who is also a guaranteed video heroine as a former Miss North Dakota.  Her father is an Iranian-American, her mother is a Japanese American, and Roxana was born in New Jersey.  You cannot make this stuff up.  Spying?  The Twelvers demonstrate a creepy, medieval opinion of all women, especially forthright Brenda Starr sorts.  The initial charge was buying a bottle of wine.   In case it wasn't obvious after all the nuke fuel provocations, these Twelvers are both smart and sick.  Roxana Saberi, who has been at the sadistic Ervin Prison in Tehran since January, can expect to serve at least half of her eight year sentence.  This will not be an easy card for the Obama team to ignore in the pursuit of "no preconditions."   Tortured, mutilated, murdered and discarded?  Unlikely, but not impossible, if you recall the case of another journalist held at Ervin Prison, the Canadian Zahra "Ziba" Kazemi-Ahmadabadi (left), who was destroyed by the Twelvers in 2003.  StateSec HRC has already spoken out in a manner that suggests Roxana Saberi is one headline from becoming a major international incident.  (Late breaking: Twelver faceman Ahmadinejad (the man is everywhere; he never sleeps) boasts that he has written a letter to the judge in the Saberi case.  Something musical about her rights being respected.  The game is afoot.)  (Also: Best Tehran source reports that the Saberi family is less than clear-eyed.  They have come down with the Stockholm Syndrome.  This will prove useful in time.)

Noticeably detached Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in a cowboy hat facing a San Francisco chamber of California-based greens is the story, not the debate.  The Obama administration has already lost the argument for additional off-shore drilling.  Diane Feinstein issued her judgment.  Negative.   It wasn't a struggle.   Stacy Delo looks to be enjoying the visual circus.  The good news is that the worldwide slack demand will keep oil prices low for another year.  After that, hyper inflation is a built-in risk, and longer term, drill, baby, drill.  For now, the cowboy hat is the story.   Does a Stetson mean on an Obama Cabinet member the same that a Stetson meant on a Bush Cabinet member?  And what is that?

Top TARP cop Elizabeth Warren (and Harvard law professor) against demonstrates her stunning skills at explaining the unknowable of the Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner plan to hand over hundreds of billions of dollars to failed managers at failed companies in order to succeed in restoring the Humpty-Dumpty credit markets.  This is part 2, the much meatier of the two segments (part 1), because Elizabeth Warren hints at the strong likelihood of major league, earth-moving, federal regulation ahead.  "...so we start pulling the threads out of the regulatory environment, and what's the first thing we get?  We get the S&L crisis..."  "...so we have two choices.  We're going to make a big decision probably over the next six months..."  "...or alternatively we're going to put in some smart regulation..."  That Elizabeth Warren makes these remarks on a comedy show is not an assuring endorsement of the age, but it is subversively charming of her.  The professor is a champ.

 

On Tax Day, Texas Governor Rick Perry shrewdly made a play to take over the shoddily managed GOP noise at the Obama administration's spend and tax policies.   This is a middle-aged man's vigorous performance on a baseball diamond, and the more so because everything about it looks scripted, rehearsed, manufactured, overexposed.  The American Governor Idol moment.  Rick Perry's running for office in the Lone Star State, an unpleasant burden which excuses most anything, including alien abduction, firing weapons in the air and loopy talk of secession from the Union.  The Obama team will feed on this hambone treat; and the GOP will feed on Perry's whimsy; and Perry will feed on the huzzahs of the blogosphere.  The self-infatuation of the establishmentarians.   It must be springtime.  Play ball!

Calculated Risk's choice California Jim the Realtor posts today a surprising positive indication in Chula Vista, California.  "The banks are starting to get it," is Jim's judgment.  This is a foreclosure, what is called an REO, and the moving picture tells the story.  Purchased at $655k in '04, it was refinanced at $828k in July '06.  Probably 100% refinanced.  The owner was clearly a greedy fool and stupid gambler, same for the mortgage lender and bank who cooked the deal.  The bank finally foreclosed and has now cleared the house up with new appliances and paint.  Jim likes this energy by the bank, and this energy might be the news.  The banks are sitting on a huge trove of REOs, waiting for the market to improve. Now they are moving.  This house, 5 bedrooms on a 5600 sq. ft lot, is listed at $399k.  It now has 41 offers.  Jim guesses it will go for $475-500k.   More than $300k vanishes, but the situation is not worthless, much like those toxic assets.  The formula is, Mark down sharply, reap 60 cents on the dollar.  Find the bottom and bounce.

The failure of the London G20 to reach agreement about protectionism, tariffs, retaliation and the clear cliff-diving of world trade may or may not be related to the civil unrest in Bangkok and throughout Thailand. I spoke to Mary Kissel, Asia Wall Street Journal, on Sunday 12, at Hong Kong, and she told me she had been scheduled to travel to Bangkok for Easter weekend but was turned back by the disorder. Japan's economy is also falling sharply and there is no unrest in Tokyo. Is there a connection between an organized (red shirts) challenge of a central government over many years standing and the current unemployment, sinking markets, long-term downturn in East Asia? Unknown.

CNN Starr chats with the US Navy three-star Vice-Admiral William Gortney of the 5th Fleet, at Bahrain, re the pirate threat in Somalia, and the question of an Al Qaeda connection to the pirates is not tossed aside like a paperback thriller.   Al-Shabaab, the local Somalia Sharia gang, strong at Mogadishu, is known in some fashion to connect to the jihadists of Al Q.  My information from best source is that the connection is practical: gun-running and cash.  The links are through the Sudan jihadists.  The whole of the Sahel is a jihadist recruiting zone.  I puzzle if the 5th Fleet staff is ordering "Wind and the Lion," now available from Itunes, just $2.99.  Recommended.

In what promises to be years of mud-throwing fun, Karl Rove heaves the "liar" word at Joe Biden for the VPOTUS memory of having spent quality "alone" time with POTUS Bush over the years. Creepy argument. Why do Biden's loopy anecdotes of being alone with Bush worry Rove so much that he challenges the memory as if this was "Witness for the Prosecution?"  A twisted jealousy?  Iago, Othello, Ms. D?  Do we now ask Mr. Bush, "Were you ever alone with Joe Biden?"  Is this a debate on the word "alone?"  Does being alone with the POTUS while an unnamed aide is in the vague neighborhood, closer than the Secret Service but farther away than a kibbitzer, qualify as alone?

Code Pink profits here from unusually slacker security arrangements for the cheerful White House Economics Council guru Larry Summer's appearance at a wonkish Washington confab. The two polite, subdued Code Pinkers seem discomfitted by how long they must stand without a script on Bloomberg TV.  The sign is predictable if ambiguous. "WE WANT OUR $$$$$ BACK!" Is Code Pink for tax cuts?  A statement by a Pinker does not provide clarity:  "Trillions of dollars are going to Wall Street bankers.  This bailout is not helping the middle class. There's nobody out there speaking for us, the little guy."

"...the newly advanced PPIP... bottom line, Treasury's efforts today could be enough.... in the past six months, Treasury has spent $590 billion from TARP... the evidence of success or failure is mixed... It is possible that Treasury's approach fails to address the depths of the current crisis... alternate approaches... the worst financial crisis it has faced since the Great Depression..." Goodnight Treasury. Goodnight dollar.  Goodnight capitalism.  Goodnight America. Goodnight moon.

Batchelor & Constable: Through the Looking Glass.  Simon Constable and I make no sense of the senseless news from the worldwide financial crisis -- the Great Depression in Denial.  From banks buying each other's junk competitively to a bullish call by hedgies and funds guys meeting in a super secret location west of the Sierras, we can find no confidence, just schemes,  manipulations, delusions, the emptying of the modern mind and then refilling it with popcorn.  The sanest group in the asylum looks to be the American consumer with a new report that credit card use dropped sharply in February.  The bankers and the hucksters want the American consumer back in the shop.  Not happening, and this must stand for the good news of the moment.  For the markets (left), there is the necessary rite of retest of the March 9 low, one hundred and fifty S&P 500 points below here (1300 Dow points below here).  The test line is the Devil's own 666.79 on the SPX.  Boo!

From Fox News, a rushed together video package of POTUS surprise dash into Baghdad. The fresh contribution here is the POTUS's choice of metaphors, in response to a pat question at a so-called student townhall meeting in Turkey, for why he has not yet transformed the American military policy -- that is, why are the American imperialists still in Baghdad?  POTUS replies that America is slow to turn around because it is "like an oil tanker...not a speedboat."   More ringing images such as this -- America is like an armored Cadillac limo not a flimsy Toyota Prius -- and we can relax our fretting that the Obama administration is anything other than a bootless caretaker apparatus waiting for re-election.  The correct metaphor for the question?  America is the guarantor of liberty and freedom, how're you doing?

Simon Constable of Dow Jones Newswires explains why it ' s so important to read the minutes of the last Federal Open Market Committee meeting. Plus, Alcoa kicks off earnings season. P.S. This looks to be the ugliest reporting season for the financials year over year since Glass-Steagall was invented in 1933. "...sponsored by Democratic Senator Carter Glass of Lynchburg, Virginia, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and Democratic Congressman Henry B. Steagall of Alabama, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency. The first Glass-Steagall Act was passed in February, 1932 in an effort to stop deflation and expanded the Federal Reserve's ability to offer rediscounts on more types of assets and issue government bonds as well as commercial paper.[4] The second Glass-Steagall Act was passed in 1933 in reaction to the collapse of a large portion of the American commercial banking system in early 1933."

This drags on for thirteen minutes, Meredith Whitney bloviating to Maria Bartiromo, on the boat deck of the Titanic (h/t CR), but you only need the first two minutes to discern that the banks are worse than ever and that no one can solve the problem.  The government TARP intervention now becomes a new crisis, because no one will risk much money on a management team and board that can be removed willy-nilly by Treasury or FDIC.  Quarterly earnings are meaningless.  All the major banks are depending upon rule changes that make the reports all need an asterisk.  Of most significance, Aaron Task, Yahoo Finance, told the roundtable on Sunday 5 that money managers have turned short-term bullish.  2+2=5.  Meanwhile, Calculated Risk says that the IMF has more facts that no CNBC chat can spin.  Toxic assets from banks and insurers may now top $4 trillion, including $900 billion from Europe and Asia.  Love is Hate.

Day Ahead: Looking for More Rally 4/6/2009 Dow Jones Newswires' Simon Constable says investors are looking to see whether the market can extend its rally for a fifth straight week. Plus, how will finance stocks react now that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has threatened to remove bank chiefs, and how will IBM shares respond as the deal to buy Sun Microsystems unravels

Simon Constable peeks at the week ahead in the markets, though, after this presentation, 

there came the considerable confusion of the Pynongyang/Tehran missile launch.  The missile may very well change the picture in Asia as the markets open for the week.  The missile is not bullish.  Sunday morning European time, POTUS made remarks on proliferation at Prague just hours after the launch. The White House was unsure if there was a connection between the launch and the POTUS remarks. Coincidence?  Old rule: The first shooter always wins.  That missile sat on the pad for weeks, inviting a shot.  Didn't happen.  Why not?

Babe Ruth was abandoned as a child into a Baltimore foundling home that showed him neither mercy nor love.  He learned to play baseball on a scrap yard, and when other kid's had birthdays, Babe had his bat and ball.  He was a miracle, nothing like him since, perhaps only Teddy Roosevelt, Davy Crockett and Natty Bumpo before him.   He taught the fans and then the nation to swing for the fences.  The house that Ruth built just got rebuilt.  Will we ever see a rebuilt Babe Ruth?  No bailouts here: round bat and round ball.  Never get beat with your second best pitch.  Hit it hard anywhere.  Not till that lady sings.  "Play ball!" 

 Unemployment Soars to 8.5% 4/3/2009 Dow Jones Newswires' Simon Constable analyzes the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  From Sudeep Reddy WSJ:

Ahead: G-20 Off and Running 4/2/2009

All eyes on the G-20 meeting in London. Plus, the ECB cuts rates and what to make of the forthcoming unemployment data. Dow Jones Newswires' Simon Constable has the report.

G20 begins with Twitter led protests.