The market is quite content with the all the Central Banks of the world uniting to provide seemingly infinite liquidity to the system. The ECB's latest proposal is to buy unlimited amounts of sovereign paper to aid those countries whose yields are moving towards their proper market-based level. The Fed is embarking on QE3, no doubt to infinity...and beyond.

Clearly, we wouldn't want the market actually deciding the appropriate risk and consequent interest rate required to invest in sovereign and agency debt, as the market's true perceived value of the risk of these instruments would be catastrophic to the global financial system. There is an undoubted irony to a market that is called free yet has a third party deciding appropriate asset level prices. Nonetheless, this is an exercise of risk transference of unprecedented magnitude.

In Europe, they are trying to transfer risk to the larger ECB and away from

It is rare to come across a structured product that is worthwhile to expand upon (because the same exposure can often be captured much more cheaply or because the embedded optionality is ridiculously complex), but in a world with 10-year US Treasury yields trading below 1.70%, an instrument that can yield 7% for 7 years is worth a closer look. Defined Payment Income Streams are vehicles which essentially take the monthly retirement payments from a person and transfer the income to a purchaser. The purchaser then continues to receive the seller's retirement income for the duration of the agreement. An example would be an investor purchasing the pension income of a retired United States Army General. The General is taking a lump sum payment up front and giving up his pension going forward in this example. When considering the credit quality of the original payer (the US Government),

Everybody loves a good story. They're nice, but we don't tend to like them more than we like data. We prefer numbers...actualization. Nobody can profess to have all the details of the story, and though numbers can be fudged, it's more difficult. The market has hated Banco Macro S.A. (BMA) this year, down nearly 50% YTD. The point is not why the market has hated it so much as that it has hated it. But this could be changing.

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Our proprietary Early Volume Indicator (EVI) has seen a tick up to 0.35, just above the threshold where we generally start to pay attention. The EVI essentially tracks recent volume on up days versus down days and is indicative of the flow that is occurring in a name, taking into account the notion that size, in the markets, does matter. For reference, a rating of 1.00 or above

In what has got to be one of the largest admittances on "trials of the efficacy of duct tape," aka "trial and error testing," aka "jerry rigging," or aka "slapping it together," FED Chairman Bernanke presented his take, quite humbly, on the FED's aggressive monetary policy enacted since 2008. From his speech: "As the Committee embarked on this path, we were guided by some general principles and some insightful academic work but - with the important exception of the Japanese case - limited historical experience. As a result, central bankers in the United States, and those in other advanced economies facing similar problems, have been in the process of learning by doing." Allow me to paraphrase. "With our principles generated, and some really good papers written by some really smart folks, we decided to ignore the one example in Japan being a marked and utter failure and see if