Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Undersecretary Carlo Giovanardi said the government will study if it's feasible to conduct drug tests on stock-exchange traders, with the help of the Milan Bourse and the country's market regulator. Giovanardi, who is in charge of family policy and drug prevention, said that the abuse of drugs including cocaine might explain part of recent stock volatility.
You would have to be on drugs to think these guys have any idea of what they are doing.
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It's hump day and I found 2 stories about a couple real screw jobs. First, I think I would flip if I was told I couldn't build a tree house for my kids, ON MY PROPERTY. Heck, I wish I could build one that looked this good.
Treehouse Faces Demolition
Mark Grapin thought his two sons would love the treehouse.
He called Fairfax County before starting to find out the rules for the Broyhill Park neighborhood in the Falls Church area of the county.
"The guy in building permits laughed me off the phone," Grapin says. He was told it's a treehouse and not built to any code.
So Grapin went to the local home improvement store, bought $1,400 worth of supplies and spent six weekends building the treehouse.
It has red clapboard siding, shingles, a slide, a pull-down ladder, two climbing ropes, closed windows and shutters.
It is wrapped around the tree but stands free, not touching the tree. It stands to the side of his house.
Grapin says his immediate neighbors had no complaints, but someone did complain anonymously to Fairfax County.
Grapin was told he had to treat it like an addition to his house and get a zoning variance. He spent more than $1,800 getting the proper forms and going through a hearing.
The home sits on a corner lot and Zoning Board Chairman John Ribble says that means what Grapin thought was a side lot is actually the front lot.
The variance was rejected.
Grapin says he has an appeal scheduled for Nov. 30, but if he loses that he will have to remove the treehouse.
"I don't have the heart for it," he says. "I'm gonna go pay some day laborers and hide in the house while they take a saw to it."
If that happens, what will he tell his kids?
"Daddy makes mistakes. We tried our best. I made a mistake by not knowing enough."
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The second story is literally a "screw job". You know this guy is bragging to all his friends about it.
"Mind Blowing" Sex Can Wipe Your Memory Clean
A 54-year-old woman showed up in the emergency room at Georgetown University Hospital with her husband, unable to remember the past 24 hours. Her newer memories were hazy, too. One thing she did recall: Her amnesia had started right after having sex with her husband just an hour before.
While sex can be forgettable or mind-blowing, for some people, it can quite literally be both at the same time. The woman, whose case was reported in the September issue of The Journal of Emergency Medicine, was experiencing transient global amnesia, a rare condition in which memory suddenly, temporarily, disappears.
People with transient global amnesia suffer no side effects, and the memory problems usually reverse themselves in the span of a few hours. It's a rare condition, affecting only about 3 to 5 people per 100,000 each year. But what makes transient global amnesia so eerie is that researchers aren't sure what causes it, or why patients remain otherwise chatty and alert while missing large chunks of their memories.
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Now that I got that out of the way, here is a way some of you could make some money. I can't give recommendations on how to take advantage of this move on the blog, but I can if you contact me. This is from Stansberry Research.
And today, Jeff sent an update saying, "Let's buy some more gold." One of Jeff's favorite indicators for the gold market just reversed from "extreme oversold" conditions, creating a buy signal. This is just the third gold-sector buy signal in the past two years…
The last two times this buy signal flashed, The Gold Bugs Index (HUI) rallied 15% in one month. Take a look at the chart:
Now, Jeff's indicator is more oversold than it was on either of the previous occasions. And he expects an even bigger rally this time around.
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Lastly, here is a look ahead to today's trading. Earnings season kicked off with Alcoa. Hopefully, most companies will have better news than they did.
Bumpy Start To Earnings Season
If Alcoa is an indication, the earnings season could be off to a rocky start.
Pepsi [PEP 60.95 -0.92 (-1.49%) ] is up next when it reports Wednesday morning, and traders are nervously awaiting banking giant J.P. Morgan's [JPM 32.30 --- UNCH ] results Thursday.
"I really think the corporate picture might even supplant the European story for the short term...For the next couple of weeks, we might see more of a focus by traders on corporate earnings," even in the bond market, said Abdullah Karatash, head of the U.S. fixed income credit trading at Natixis.
Markets have been hanging on every development in Europe's sovereign debt crisis, but now traders are looking to U.S. company forecasts to see how much a weakening Europe and the hit to confidence might affect corporate profits and the U.S. economy.
"The corporate story will give a little more clarity. Up until now, the European story has been somewhat opaque. I think clarity is lacking in the market," he said.
"Frozen by Fear"
Alcoa kicked off the earnings season Tuesday on a weak note that could spook investors. Its stock fell more than 5 percent in late trading, after it reported profits of $0.15 per share, below the $0.22 expected by analysts. Revenues increased to $6.42 billion from $5.28 billion. The company blamed its miss on lower metal prices, seasonal factors, but also softness in Europe.
Alcoa [AA 10.30 0.21 (+2.08%) ] CEO Klaus Kleinfeld, in an interview on CNBC said the "world is frozen by fear and (it is) cooling down growth. It almost feels like we're worrying ourselves into another recession." He said the fear can be seen in the increase in speculative short selling in Alcoa and other commodities companies' shares.
But he also stressed things are better than they were in the financial crisis and he called Alcoa a "confident company in a very nervous world."
Alcoa affirmed its forecast of a growth rate of 12 percent for global aluminum demand for 2011 and said that it expects demand to double by 2020. Alcoa's earnings report hurt sentiment in Asia, where Tokyo stocks were trading lower early Wednesday morning. U.S. stock futures were also lower in Tuesday evening trading, after stocks traded quietly in Tuesday's session. The Dow finished down 16 at 11,416, and the S&P 500 was up less than a point at 1195.
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Those Europeans do make good commercials though.
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