Stewart Gordon

Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News

This column cites housing inventories -I think they are understated. Do you know what sales rate is being used in the divisor??

The Federal Reserve, the Economy, and Stocks

Until someone tells me how the CDO issue (the trigger of this,if you please) is resolved, not by the Fed,or the Fed Gov't., or by any magic wand, rather by a step-by-step exposition of the REAL steps it will take to unwind a mortgage default on 123 Main St. USA that sits in the CDO portfolio of a cash-squeezed financial institution at 789 never-never land, Wall St. USA or a bankrupt bank/financial institution at ein-zwei-drei Das-Strasse, EU, I will have a hard time agreeing with anyone's forecast or crystal ball. Absolutely no one has yet dealt with that hard, fundamental issue - the core issue recognized implicitly last August. Write-offs, insurance company bail-outs are tangential problems whose solution or partial solution doesn't truly solve the core cause.
The detailed exposition of a solution that will be implemented, however painful or onerous its impacts, will be the first step in a long road to establishing the accepted valuations whose current absence is destroying peoples' ability to trust anyone who is called "financial" or borrower. The inability or failure to see how to do this rather specific act is assiduously sabotaging all the other efforts, to date, because none of the the so-called incremental solutions deal with the fundamental issue of unwinding the originating trade.
Since all of the above analyses, up-down-and sideways, goldilocks & apocalypse, fail to provide this, I do not believe they can be tested for validity as they have not illustrated a process on which their or anyone's potentially positive vision must be based. Growin$$