There have been losses for both large caps and small caps by the midday, which indicate a leaning toward the hold side.

ECRI's WLI Growth Index again improved marginally, and remains in positive territory. A positive number predicts positive growth to come within the next six months.

Premarkets were sailing along at +0.05% until the 'not-so-good' March Payroll and Unemployment came in as a miss. The 'Taper the Taper' advocates jumped in and drove the premarkets up in the +0.55% area.

If the Lehman Brothers failure proved anything, it was that large, complex bank failures are messy; they destroy value and can destabilize financial markets. We certainly don’t mean to trivialize matters by calling large bank failures “messy,” as it their messiness, particularly the destabilizing aspect, that creates the “too-big-to-fail” problem.

Trustee for MF Global has announced that the company will now begin making final distributions to its customers to satisfy its obligation of full restitution for $1.212 billion in losses sustained by customers of MF Global when the company failed in 2011.

This article discusses one sentence from last night's NYT piece that notes the position on deflation of the head of the European Central Bank (Mario Draghi).

The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged two friends with insider trading on confidential information from an investment banker about an impending transaction between engineering and construction companies.

Global digital music revenues reached an all-time high of $5.9 billion last year. Revenues from streaming services, both ad-supported (+17.6%) and subscription-based (+51.3%), saw strong growth that outweighed a slight decline in download sales (-2.1%).

Recently I took a swipe at Bank of England over a speech by its Governor Mark Carney that was unrealistic about the dangers of a bloated financial sector. Today I'm doffing my cap for a new paper which gives a truly realistic explanation of how money is created, why this really matters, and why virtually everything that economic textbooks say about money is wrong.

Premarkets were mostly flat and then jumped to +0.16% just before the opening bell. Markets opened in the green as the DOW and SP500 again set new historical highs at 16604.15 and 1893.80.

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced charges against a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based financial services firm for improperly calculating advisory fees and overcharging clients. Transamerica failed to process every aggregation request by clients and also had conflicting policies on whether representatives were required to pass on to clients the savings from breakpoint discounts.

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and its 209 registered subsidiaries was one of the largest and most complex in history, with more than $1 trillion of creditor claims in the United States alone, four bodies of applicable U.S. laws, and insolvency proceedings that involved over eighty international legal jurisdictions.

New figures show employers announced the fewest first-quarter job cuts in 19 years, providing further evidence that the economy continues to gain strength as it enters the sixth year of recovery.

Many are aware that U.S. college graduates have trouble finding work. Recently Reuters reported that the official unemployment rate for recent graduates ranged from 3-4% for some majors up to 7-8% for others.

The purpose of MiMi is to allow the user to check-on the health and the stability of the US housing market not only nationally, but on a state by state basis as well!

According to Pew Research's State of the News Media, the role that social media plays in the spreading of news isn’t as big as many people tend to believe. The only social network that is really relevant as a news source is Facebook with 30 percent of U.S. adults at least occasionally using it to get news.