US Stocks Climb To Nearly 19-Month Highs; S&P 500 Above 1200

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-climb-to-nearly-19-month-highs-sp-500-above-1200-2010-04-14


By Donna Kardos

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- U.S. stocks climbed Wednesday, lifting the Standard & Poor's 500 above 1200 for the first time in nearly 19 months as strong earnings from J.P. Morgan, Intel and CSX boosted expectations for the first-quarter reporting season.

The S&P 500 rose 13.35, or 1.12%, to 1210.65, its highest close since Sept. 26, 2008. The measure's gains were led by its financial and technology sectors, which were lifted by earnings results from J.P. Morgan Chase and Intel, respectively.

J.P. Morgan jumped 1.86, or 4.1%, to 47.73, as its first-quarter earnings rose 55%. Delinquencies continued to decline and the bank set aside less money to cover loans expected to go bad.

Intel (Nasdaq) climbed 75 cents, or 3.3%, to 23.52, as the world's leading microchip maker's quarterly profit nearly quadrupled on 44% revenue growth.

J.P. Morgan and Intel also boosted the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which rose 103.69 points, or 0.94%, to 11123.11, also its highest close since Sept. 26, 2008. The measure's other top performers were also concentrated in the financial and technology sectors. Bank of America climbed 73 cents, or 3.9%, to 19.40 and American Express advanced 1.47, or 3.3%, to 46.46, while International Business Machines rose 2.22, or 1.7%, to 131.25, and Cisco Systems (Nasdaq) added 44 cents, or 1.7%, to 26.88.

Read more at link...http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-climb-to-nearly-19-month-highs-sp-500-above-1200-2010-04-14

Last month we had the most amount of job gains in years.

The Obama recovery marches on :hi:

Where is the incentive to create millions of good paying jobs that support families. They are celebrating new highs after 30 years of stagnant wages and and recent culling of 8.5 million workers and counting. Why create well paid jobs, that costs money.

If you fall off a building and break every bone in your body, and it takes a year for you to walk out of the hospital using two crutches, are you better than you were after you hit the ground? Did you become well in an instant, or did you have to mend over time?

Our economy fell off a building and broke every bone in its body under Bush. Under Obama, we have begun to see a sustained, one plus year trend that is now producing more optimism among Americans than we have had in over two years. Why would you think that's not good news?

This obsession some have resenting the gains in the stock market would be comical if not so tragic. The surging stock market is better for the economy and for job seekers.

been a leading indicator of the broad economy?

Either you can rebut my point - which you didn't - or you can try to pretend I said something I didn't, and deflect with that distraction. You've chosen the latter.

We're just deluding in a more positive direction now. :)

raking in the big bucks on today's gains. This was no accident. It's like a religion with you people. Believe in the almighty wall street, it leads us all.

It's a cesspool of fucking crooks gaming a rotten, unregulated criminal system they built to pocket as much loot as humanly possible before people start literally going after them with shotguns.

If I had a nickel for every time in the last week or so I have read here on DU the bogus right wing claim that the middle class is heavily invested in the stock market I'd be rich. That fiction is debunked every time it's vomited up by those gatekeepers in the upper middle class who worship wall street and still people insist it's true.

Wall street is an accurate measure of the level that working americans, the majority of which if they are lucky have but a few thousand in a 401k, are getting reamed.

You can't build an economy on a un-investigated, un-indicted foundation of free as a bird criminals wallowing in rot and corruption.

And these crooks are going to usher in a recovery that benefits the working class and creates good paying jobs with wages that actually increase with increased productivity. Sure, just like magic.

I don't attempt to talk sense to people who evidence little.

Looting Main Street
How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

"Birmingham became the poster child for a new kind of giant-scale financial fraud, one that would threaten the financial stability not only of cities and counties all across America, but even those of entire countries like Greece. While for many Americans the financial crisis remains an abstraction, a confusing mess of complex transactions that took place on a cloud high above Manhattan sometime in the mid-2000s, in Jefferson County you can actually see the rank criminality of the crisis economy with your own eyes; the monster sticks his head all the way out of the water. Here you can see a trail that leads directly from a billion-dollar predatory swap deal cooked up at the highest levels of America's biggest banks, across a vast fruited plain of bribes and felonies — "the price of doing business," as one JP Morgan banker says on tape — all the way down to Lisa Pack's sewer bill and the mass layoffs in Birmingham.

Once you follow that trail and understand what took place in Jefferson County, there's really no room left for illusions. We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over. It's our turn to get laughed at. In Birmingham, lots of people have gone to jail for the crime: More than 20 local officials and businessmen have been convicted of corruption in federal court. Last October, right around the time that Lisa Pack went back to work at reduced hours, Birmingham's mayor was convicted of fraud and money-laundering for taking bribes funneled to him by Wall Street bankers — everything from Rolex watches to Ferragamo suits to cash. But those who greenlighted the bribes and profited most from the scam remain largely untouched. "It never gets back to JP Morgan," says Pack."

snip

"Given the shitload of money to be made on the refinancing deals, JP Morgan was prepared to pay whatever it took to buy off officials in Jefferson County. In 2002, during a conversation recorded in Nixonian fashion by JP Morgan itself, LeCroy bragged that he had agreed to funnel payoff money to a pair of local companies to secure the votes of two county commissioners. "Look," the commissioners told him, "if we support the synthetic refunding, you guys have to take care of our two firms." LeCroy didn't blink. "Whatever you want," he told them. "If that's what you need, that's what you get. Just tell us how much."

Just tell us how much. That sums up the approach that JP Morgan took a few months later, when Langford announced that his good buddy Bill Blount would henceforth be involved with every financing transaction for Jefferson County. From JP Morgan's point of view, the decision to pay off Blount was a no-brainer. But the bank had one small problem: Goldman Sachs had already crawled up Blount's trouser leg, and the broker was advising Langford to pick them as Jefferson County's investment bank.

The solution they came up with was an extraordinary one: JP Morgan cut a separate deal with Goldman, paying the bank $3 million to fuck off, with Blount taking a $300,000 cut of the side deal. Suddenly Goldman was out and JP Morgan was sitting in Langford's lap. In another conversation caught on tape, LeCroy joked that the deal was his "philanthropic work," since the payoff amounted to a "charitable donation to Goldman Sachs" in return for "taking no risk."

cont..

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street/1

Do you honestly think that the criminals that run wall street give a crap whether they ever get around to creating good jobs for working americans. They'll give just enough to keep the perpetually comfortable upper middle class happy with their returns on investments and the rest of us working class slobs can suck eggs. Good jobs means the crooks on wall street would have to share part of that 90% of the pie they hoard for themselves. Not going to happen. We can't even manage to send one to jail when they rob the public in full view of the world.

Something to consider though: almost all the gains in the market over many years have been accumulated in the November-April period. Probably because people are funding tax dodges during that period, which helps the market. The big inflows of money into mutual funds are during that period. You can find years where rallies stopped on or close to April 15. Thus the saying: sell in May and go away.

But the May-October period has a neutral to negative return on average over many years. These trends held over many years. And even though the current big rally started in March 2009, it only partially recovers the ground lost in the market collapse of May-October 2008.