Should Goldman Sachs (GS) trade with a single-digit P/E ratio?  (Peridot Capitalist)

The short case for (really against) Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA) stock.  (Greenbackd)

Bruce Berkowitz of the Fairholme Fund adds to his junk financials position with a purchase of AIG (AIG).  (Morningstar)

Everybody is already short the Euro.  (FT Alphaville)

Why commodity-linked equities can move quite differently than the underlying commodities.  (Minyanville)

Matthew Lynn, “The ideal hedge fund should be like a good local restaurant: reliable, high-quality, a loyal group of customers, and unknown to the rest of the world.”  (Bloomberg)

The hedge fund industry is poised to return to record assets under management.  (Marketwatch)

James Simons’ Renaissance Technologies is trying to transition leadership.  (WSJ also Dealbreaker)

Do you want your mutual fund manager to run a hedge fund on the side?  (All About Alpha)

“While the argument for investing in the equity benchmark has a lot of merit (low cost, the difficulty in finding an outperforming manager), the case for using bond benchmarks is deeply flawed.”  (Buttonwood)

Apparently it doesn’t matter what funds you put in target-date funds.  (Morningstar)

Investors should diversify across anomalies to increase returns.  (CXO Advisory Group)

Be afraid, be very afraid.  CLOs are back.  (Bloomberg)

A handful of thoughts on the Lehman Brothers report.  (Rortybomb, TheDeal)

The blogs have been all over the Lehman Brothers story compared to the MSM.  (CJR)

David Merkel, “Dumb regulation is good regulation.”  (Aleph Blog)

The Volcker Rule looks like it is getting pushed aside.  (Clusterstock also MarketBeat)

Justin Fox, “But what about corporate America? What does it think about financial reform? It’s actually really hard to say.”  (HBR)

2012 is a huge year for junk bond refinancings.  (NYTimes)

When will the great deleveraging end?  (FT Alphaville)

Did the Fed keep rates “too low” or “too long”?  (John Taylor)

“No matter how you look at it, housing starts in the US remain stuck near record low level.” (Bespoke)

GDP growth will be smaller this quarter, but ironically healthier.  (Real Time Economics)

Shipping containers are getting put back into service.  (The Money Game)

Gideon Rachman, “Is China like the US in 1890? Or is it more like Japan in 1980? If the parallel with America is right, China is likely to be the dominant power of the next century.”  (FT)

Why is China’s household consumption rate so low?  (Free exchange)

Warning:  Physics envy may be hazardous to your wealth. (arXiv via MoneyScience)

Why financial plans are worthless.  (Bucks Blog)

Felix Salmon, “Lewis’s achievement with The Big Short is that he’s written a book that a huge number of people will love to read: it’s not just for finance geeks.”  (Reuters)

The story behind the Harvard-thesis that inspired Michael Lewis.  (Deal Journal)

The economics of aggregation.  (Economist’s View)

The FCC wants to bring high-speed Internet service to 90% of the population.  (WashingtonPost)

Can magazines thrive on the iPad and Web simultaneously?  (Felix Salmon also Atlantic Business)

Should the market fear the release of Oliver Stone’s new Wall Street movie?  (Marketwatch also Clusterstock)

Donna Kardos Yesalavich, “Hedge funds and proprietary trading shops are working to automate trading on information and sentiment from the blogosphere and Twitter, an effort that could make social media even more influential.”  (WSJ also New Rules of Investing, A VC)

Howard’s favorite features from the new Stocktwits.com.  (Howard Lindzon)

How the social web can increase our “online status anxiety.”  (The Frontal Cortex)

Don’t forget to sign up for our 2nd annual NCAA bracket challenge.  (Abnormal Returns)

What are you waiting for?  Become a fan of Abnormal Returns on Facebook.

1st Place:   a 3 month subscription to a StockTwits premium service of your choice;
2nd Place: signed copies of Brian Shannon and Adam Warner’s books;
3rd Place:  a StockTwits shwag pack.

You can sign up for our pool over at CBS Sports.  You will need a CBS Sports account and the password:  “lenny” to complete the process.  The deadline is, of course, tip-off of the first game on Thursday.

For those with a quantitative bent there are some resources available to help guide your selections.  The two main sources of quantitative rankings for NCAA basket come from Ken Pomeroy and Jeff Sagarin.

Erich Doerr at The Wages of Wins Journal uses both of these models to predict the tournament winner.  In one case Kansas came out on top, in the other Duke won.

Wayne Winston at mathletics uses the Sagarin ratings to compute the odds of winning for each team.  Again Kansas and Duke come out as the two top contenders.

David Letscher has his own prediction model and provided some tips a few years ago in the New York Times on how to avoid the crowds in picking your brackets.

The LRMC Model maintained by a handful of professors at Georgia Tech is also worth a look.  In their model Kansas again comes out the champion.  We found this model in an article by Sarah Lorge Butler at CBS Moneywatch on how to win your bracket competition.

Also check out this “seeding anomaly” from The Sports Economist.

We hope you enjoy the Madness.  That is of course if your national champion doesn’t get knocked out in the first round…

Performance by month for options expiration week.  (Quantifiable Edges)

The big hedge funds don’t always win.  Today’s example, Boston Scientific (BSX).  (The Reformed Broker also MarketBeat)

Apple (AAPL) holders be wary when “market cap bigger than” stories come out.  (Infectious Greed)

“Seems to us that if Bill Gates is as smart as Warren Buffett thinks, and if Bill Gates really wants to see his legacy survive, he should buy Steve Ballmer an iPad.”  (Jeff Matthews)

Does a momentum strategy work with style ETFs?  (CXO Advisory Group)

What are the most common mistakes that traders make?  (TraderFeed)

Prime brokers are demanding more collateral from their clients.  (Bloomberg)

Charles Davi, “Therefore, by looking to the fees that protection sellers demand in the CDS market, we can get an overall, market-based sense of the creditworthiness of a particular issuer.” (Atlantic Business)

On the need for a dynamic approach to financial market regulation to avoid market fragility.  (Rajiv Sethi)

Mixed news on the economic indicator front.  (Calculated Risk, Carpe Diem)

The challenges ahead for world oil production are many.  (Econbrowser)

What happens if America’s credit rating is downgraded?  (Economix)

Economists still can’t agree on what caused (and exacerbated) the “single most important economic event in recent memory.”  (Economist’s View)

If the net-net-net returns on stocks is just over 1% what does that mean for 401(k) plans?  (Curious Capitalist)

Michael Lewis discusses the financial crisis on 60 Minutes.  (CBS News)

A look at three “character driven narratives” on the role of CDS in the credit crisis.  (Economic Principals)

More on Michael Lewis’ new book The Big Short.  (The Big Money, DealBook)

Is Skype aiming for an IPO in 2010?  (DealBook)

What are you waiting for?  Become a fan of Abnormal Returns on Facebook.

The state of equity market sentiment at week-end.  (Trader’s Narrative, The Technical Take)

The online brokers rated.  (Barron’s)

Jason Zweig, “It is high time for companies to cut shareholders a bigger slice of the pie.”  (WSJ)

Fred Wilson, “So what to do when your bank is paying you 0.00%?”  (A VC)

Two ETFs launch that cover the copper and platinum industries.  (ETF Trends)

Natural gas has become more like coal and less like oil.  (Economist)

Retail stocks are on fire.  (Bespoke)

Where the Ultimate Stock Pickers are putting new money.  (Morningstar)

Apple (AAPL) is now the third largest domestic company by market cap and COO Tim Cook gets a bonus.  (Tech Trader Daily, WSJ)

Wall Street hates Garmin (GRMN).  Should you?  (Barron’s)

A profile of Didier Sornette and his hunt for financial bubbles.  (WSJ)

Why traders lose money in slow markets.  (TraderFeed)

Why muni bond investors are shifting from general obligation bonds to revenue bonds.  (Aleph Blog)

A look at ever-rising CMBS delinquency rates.  (FT Alphaville)

Bankruptcy activity is down, but does that mean the worst is over?  (Deal Journal)

Paul Murphy, “The trouble is that speculation is to financial markets what claptrap is to the political system: absolutely crucial.”  (FT Alphaville)

Roger Ehrenberg, “Between lobbying dollars and entrenched interests, our financial regulatory regimes have become so perverted as to have little basis in reality.”  (Information Arbitrage)

Ernst & Young has much to answer for in the demise of Lehman Brothers.  (Felix Salmon)

Are other investment banks masking their borrowing as Lehman Brothers did?  (Reuters)

Ravi Nagarajan, “If Lehman’s story can be distilled down to its core problem, it seems to be that the company’s CEO did not regard himself as the Chief Risk Officer. “  (Ideas Report)

Maybe it is a good thing consumer confidence remains muted in the face of a rising stock market.  (NYTimes)

The consumer is unhappy, but continues to spend.  (EconomPic Data)

What does the divergence between Gross Domestic Product and Income imply about the recession?  (macroblog)

Mixed news on the transportation front.  (Carpe Diem, Calculated Risk)

Global housing prices may have further to fall.  (Real Time Economics)

Why value investing is as much an emotional exercise as a technical discipline.  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

Men are more overconfident than women when it comes to investing.  (NYTimes)

While making inroads behavioral finance has not replaced standard models…yet.  (Simoleon Sense)

How some bettors are planning to play the new Cantor Future Exchange movie contracts.  (DailyFinance also Clusterstock)

A short review of Scott Patterson’s The Quants.  (The Reformed Broker)

Google (GOOG) is nearly certain to close its Chinese search engine.  (Reuters, DigiCha)

To what degree are the cable operators going to control the online television viewing experience?  (BusinessWeek)

Managed care is coming.  It is just a matter of form (and time).  (NYTimes also Marginal Revolution)

Always think of yourself as a student.  (CSS Analytics)

What are you waiting for?  Become a fan of Abnormal Returns on Facebook.

Individual investors still have some buying power left.  (Big Picture)

How bullish (or bearish) is the investment blogosphere?  (The Pragmatic Capitalist)

Gold timers are stubbornly bullish in light of a drop in gold.  (Marketwatch also The Money Game)

The steep yield curve is working against commodities and gold.  (Fundmastery Blog)

On the relationship between the VIX and the slope of the yield curve.  (SurlyTrader)

Money continues to flow into high yield and emerging market bond funds.  (The Money Game)

Joe Donoghue’s trading rules.  (UpsideTrader)

Brett Steenbarger, “If you don’t know your edge and cannot formulate it succinctly, you won’t have the inner confidence to weather trading setbacks.”  (TraderFeed)

Why investors might want to give Joel Greenblatt’s “magic formula” strategy a closer look.  (Morningstar)

An approach to better utilize earnings accruals.  (CXO Advisory Group)

The past year has been a tough time to try and short stocks, even on a swing basis.  (Downtowntrader)

More big pharma research failures, like Pfizer’s, imply more biotech acquisitions.  (24/7 Wall St.)

PIMCO plans six more bond ETFs.  (ETF Database)

More on the forthcoming CBOE IPO. (WSJ)

Live from the NYSE…it’s KKR!  (DealBook also 24/7 Wall St.)

A sign of the times?  Farallon Capital pulling back from equity trading.  (WSJ)

Why hedge funds like to list on an exchange…survival.  (All About Alpha)

How much can hedge funds successfully manage?  (Money Science)

It remains as difficult as ever to start up a hedge fund.  (CNNMoney)

Why the past decade was the golden age for activist investors in the small cap sector.  (Greenbackd, ibid)

John Authers, “The secret of successful investing has always been to find inefficient markets and exploit them.  Emerging markets, for all their development in recent years, still offer more market inefficiencies than the rest of the world.”  (FT)

Investment bankers don’t owe a fiduciary responsibility to you, the shareholder.  (The Epicurean Dealmaker)

Nobody killed Lehman Brothers.  They did all themselves.  (Jeff Matthews, Big Picture, DJ Market Talk, Clusterstock)

Is Janet Yellen going to be a dove as Fed Vice Chairman?  (FT Alphaville also Real Time Economics)

Retail sales came in ahead of expectations.  (Calculated Risk, Capital Spectator)

Rail traffic continues to improve.  (Carpe Diem)

Shipping bottlenecks are slowing the US export boom.  (WSJ)

Now might be the time for a little yuan revaluation.  (Econbrowser)

Japan has budget problems, but it is not yet dependent on foreigners to purchase their debt.  (Economist)

Has Canada’s housing market completely avoided the crisis?  (Money Supply)

The Fed is essentially done buying MBS.  What not for mortgage rates?  (Calculated Risk)

Another wave of home foreclosures is on the horizon.  (WashingtonPost)

Felix Salmon raves about Michael Lewis‘ The Big Short.  (BN Review)

A review of Scott Patterson’s The Quants.  (market folly)

Your financial advisor may be a “yes man.”  (Fortune via Curious Capitalist)

Why a real money Hollywood Stock Exchange is a bad idea.  (WashingtonPost contra Clusterstock)

How to in a formal way address your “emotional blindspots” when trading.  (Derek Hernquist)

How Twitter has affect investor attention spans and the rate at which information is processed by the market.  (SmartMoney)

The mainstream media need not fear the “loss of control” over social media use.  (GigaOM)

Happy St.Patrick’s Day.  Why Guinness is good for you.  (Chicago Tribune)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

The Russell 2000 has retraced some two-thirds of its bear market move.  (Barron’s)

The problems with using put/call ratios as a market indicator.  (Options Zone)

Volume has picked up dramatically in the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures ETN (VXX).  (Bespoke)

Investors are loading up high yield muni bonds.  (Bloomberg also Money & Co.)

The credit markets have opened back up again.  (WSJ)

A peek at the TIPS yield curve shows bonds are not cheap.  (Crossing Wall Street)

The case for the Canadian dollar.  (Credit Writedowns)

The CBOE is moving towards an IPO.  (WSJ, MarketBeat)

Essential rules for short selling.  (James Altucher)

Testing the turn-of-the-month trading strategy.  (MarketSci Blog)

Soft commodities are in a permanent downtrend due in large part to advancing technology.  (The Money Game)

Jeff Miller, “Here is the biggest challenge for most investors: You have an opinion, and you are unwilling to see any new evidence.“  (A Dash of Insight)

Tom Brakke, “To date, the evidence supports the view that portfolio differentiation as measured by active share is a key metric to assess manager skill.”  (the research puzzle)

An eight stock index fund.  (Crossing Wall Street)

Do hedge funds covered by the news media underperform “hidden gems?”  (CXO Advisory Group)

Hedge fund managers who made the Forbes list of billionaires. (market folly)

Why exactly does Barclays (BCS) want to buy a U.S. bank?  (Atlantic Business)

How much is AIG (AIG) ultimately going to cost taxpayers?  (Newsweek)

The Feds made a hash out the GMAC bailout.  (Calculated Risk)

Barry Ritholtz, “This is simple, folks: Derivatives should not receive special treatment — they need to be regulated the way most other financial products in the world are.”  (Big Picture)

Why is Greece still rated investment grade?  (The Money Game)

The long term look at sovereign default cycles.  (Free exchange)

How a country becomes beholden to the credit markets.  (Rajiv Sethi)

Ramping up inflation is not a viable strategy for developed country debt woes.  (Economist)

Why hedge fund managers often ignore the risk of inflation.  (Felix Salmon)

Should we welcome a rise in the unemployment rate?  (Atlantic Business)

How concerned should we be about a flattening out in initial jobless claims?  (DJ Market Talk)

Why has the recession hit small business so hard?  (Real Time Economics)

How much revolving debt have consumer actually paid down?  (EconomPic Data, Felix Salmon)

The pension fund crisis is coming.  (Institutional Investor)

We continue to underestimate the demand for oil in developing markets.  (Gregor Macdonald)

Ed Thorpe on the key questions for risk management.  (Farnam Street)

A neat graph of our behavioral vulnerabilities.  (Big Picture)

Do we really want to give people the ability to bet real money on box office returns?  (NYTimes, LATimes)

Bonjour Cannes.  Hold on America.  Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps release date gets pushed back.  (Variety)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

Ten years later, “It’s tempting, but wrong, to write off the tech mania as mass insanity by the ignorant and ill-informed.”  (WSJ)

“Misallocation of capital is everywhere and anywhere a fallout of bad government policy.”  (Andy Kessler)

Small cap outperformance isn’t a new phenomenon.  It has been going on for ten years now.  (Bespoke, ibid)

Options traders, as measured by the put/call ratio, have gotten a bit too complacent.  (Quantifiable Edges, Trader’s Narrative)

What does the RVX/VIX ratio tell us about market turning points? (Investing With Options)

Deep value opportunities in insurance stocks.  (Street Capitalist)

Hedge funds love high quality growth stocks.  (market folly)

Regulators are misguided in preventing banks from paying dividends.  (Clusterstock)

Pre-holiday trading has lost its edge.  (MarketSci Blog)

Speculation about what bank should Barclays (BCS) buy?  (Deal Journal, MarketBeat)

The Russian ruble (and bonds) are  on quite a run of late.  (FT Alphaville, WSJ also BusinessWeek)

What Tilson and Tongue are buying.  (Tech Ticker)

An interview with microcap investor (and professor) Paul Sonkin.  (Value Walk)

Wall Street is cleaning up on Build America Bonds.  Should you?  (WSJ also IndexUniverse)

Coming soon an international, investment grade corporate bond fund, the Barclays Capital International Corporate Bond (IBND).  (ETF Trends)

Big pharma is increasingly relying on their animal health businesses to weather drug patent expirations.  (Minyanville)

Let’s end the debate over the tax treatment of carried interest once and for all.  (peHUB, Clusterstock)

How to regulate CDS.  (Felix Salmon)

David Merkel, “Unless there is a natural purchaser of an exposure that one is trying to hedge, someone must speculate to a degree to allow you to hedge.  If the speculator is undercapitalized, risks to the financial system rise.”  (Aleph Blog)

Why the SEC’s Chief Economist really quit.  (Dealbreaker)

Economists should focus on the lead up to the housing bubble as the popping of the bubble.  (Econbrowser)

The Federal Reserve needs more governors with expertise in financial markets.  (Mark Thoma)

What the tick up in tax withholdings is saying about the health of the economy.  (Big Picture)

A notable tick up in job openings.  (EconomPic Data, Calculated Risk)

The A.D.S. Business Conditions Index is indicating slower growth ahead.  (The Pragmatic Capitalist)

First the Olympic hockey gold medal and now this:  Canada’s economic growth is better balanced.  (Economist’s View)

Has nuclear energy missed its chance?  (Gregor Macdonald also Humble Student)

Why the new Cisco (CSCO) router won’t make your Internet experience any faster.  (Silicon Alley Insider also Seeking Alpha)

Quantifying the benefit of free content to Seeking Alpha.  (World Beta)

An in depth piece on the ugly TCW-Jeffrey Grundlach breakup.  (Fortune)

Newspapers need to a better job of engaging their readers.  (GigaOM)

On the value of interaction:  StockTwits vs. CNBC.  (ValuePlays)

Why we fixate on enemies and inflate their perceived power.  (Marginal Revolution)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

Is the risk trade back on again?  (The Money Game)

Shiller vs. Siegel on market valuation.  (WSJ also Crossing Wall Street)

Lessons learned a year from the market bottom.  (Big Picture, MarketBeat, Morningstar, Marketwatch)

Country stock market performance one year into the bull market.  (Bespoke)

Are mutual funds truly “burning through cash” or is there another explanation?  (Don Fishback also Behind the Headlines, Mish)

The top ten buys and sells of ultimate stock pickers.  (Morningstar)

Brett Arends, “By any measure of shareholder value, GE has been a disaster under Jeffrey Immelt. Investors haven’t made a nickel since he took the helm as chairman nine years ago. In fact, they’ve lost tens of billions of dollars.”  (Marketwatch)

Noted value investor Bruce Berkowitz thinks Citigroup (C) is cheap.  (CNNMoney)

Brett Steenbarger, “My own experience is that I have lost good amounts of money when I’ve stuck with discipline over trusting my gut.”  (TraderFeed)

Calculating returns for the Fosback Seasonality system.  (MarketSci Blog)

Three new broad-based equity ETFs coming from Claymore.  (IndexUniverse)

On the use of market cap/GDP as a valuation measure.  (Data Diary)

Risks in the capital markets are numerous and often unquantifiable.  (CXO Advisory Group)

Given the profits on buying General Growth Properties (GGP) securities in bankruptcy no wonder investors are lining up to help them emerge.  (WSJ, ibid)

Everybody wants to own farmland.  (Clusterstock)

The case for commercial real estate.  (Infectious Greed)

The hold CME Group (CME) has on Treasury futures is under assault.  (FT)

“The very notion of mobs and herds evokes a certain spontaneity. But with the gold bubble, we are moving on to a concept of herding by appointment.”  (Rick Bookstaber)

Hedge fund managers continue to expand operations in Asia.  (FT Alphaville)

Should the NBER classify GDP recessions and jobs recessions separately?  (Department of Numbers)

Economic sentiment is not improving.  (Real Time Economics, Free exchange)

Tim Geither right on crisis, wrong on reform.  (The Atlantic also MarketBeat, Credit Writedowns)

“Making grandiose, nonsensical pronouncements that all bankers are crooks just doesn’t help matters, and it focuses attention and energy away from real problems which need to be addressed posthaste.”  (The Epicurean Dealmaker also Interfluidity)

The administration’s lack of a “too big too fail” policy is a failure of regulatory politics.  (The Balance Sheet)

The Fed does NOT want a GAO audit.  (Huffington Post)

What questions should we ask of forthcoming Federal Reserve governor nominees?  (Big Picture)

David Cottle, “Instead of railing against the markets, European leaders might do well to appreciate their warning shots.”  (The Source also Buttonwood)

What would a European Monetary Fund (EMF) look like?  (WSJ, FT Alphaville)

“If America loses its position as the world’s largest and most powerful economy does it really matter?”  (Free exchange)

Two lines of thought on the nascent state of the economic recovery, post-credit crisis.  (HBR, Credit Writedowns)

US Treasuries are “the only game in town” for China.  (24/7 Wall St.)

Public pension funds are reaching for returns.  (NYTimes, Clusterstock)

John Carney, “Carried interest taxation as capital gains is not a loophole. It’s a straight-forward application of basic tax rules to the partnership structure of hedge funds.”  (Clusterstock)

Part 2 of an interview with James Montier.  (Simoleon Sense)

Ten guidelines for enjoying the stock market.  (Howard Lindzon)

What are the unintended consequences of commission-free ETF trading?  (Morningstar)

Carl Richards, “We need to recognize that we’re not as smart as we think we are. In fact, the smartest investors (and frankly the smartest financial advisers) are the ones that acknowledge that they’re dumb.”  (Bucks Blog)

The mainstream media has learned the wrong lessons from the blogging revolution.  (Clusterstock)

On “ethic of the web” and the value of a link.  (GigaOM, True/Slant)

The “third wave” of coffee purveyors is looking to wean consumers from corporate coffee providers like Starbucks (SBUX). (Time)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

How overbought are the markets here?  (Trade to Learn)

The Nasdaq Composite is above pre-Lehman levels.  (Bespoke)

Equity mutual funds are burning through their cash on hand.  (Bloomberg)

Why a 17 or so VIX is not that surprising. (Options Zone)

Barton Biggs thinks global large cap stocks are wicked cheap.  (The Money Game)

Outperformance aside, by one measure small caps are still cheap.  (Trader’s Narrative)

Americans much prefer overseas stocks to their own.  (WSJ also The Money Game)

International diversification, over the long term.  (CXO Advisory Group)

The world’s biggest hedge fund managers.  (Pensions & Investments)

Why hedge funds like Mead Johnson Nutrition (MJN).  (market folly)

Whatever happened to nanotech?  (Bespoke)

Be careful when quoting fund dividend yields.  (EconomPic Data)

Why does J.P. Morgan (JPM) trade at book value?  (Breakingviews)

AIG (AIG) is out of “crown jewels” to sell.  (DealBook, Deal Journal)

John Hussman, “A deleveraging cycle is much like a secular bear market in that the market experiences a great deal of volatility, but tends to establish a sequence of troughs, each at lower levels of valuation (even if not at lower absolute prices).”  (Hussman Funds also The Technical Take)

Sorry critics, Tim Geithner’s plan worked.  The financial system was saved.  (New Yorker also Baseline Scenario)

Roger Lowenstein, “Protecting consumers and breaking up large banks is fine. But neither will prevent banks from acting stupidly again. The surest safeguard is to ensure that, when they do, they aren’t up to their necks in debt.”  (Bloomberg)

A new index of financial conditions.  (Econbrowser, FT Alphaville)

The Greek crisis has faded.  (MarketBeat, Clusterstock)

Portugal tries on an austerity program.  (FT Alphaville)

The problem of the long term unemployed remains.  (Calculated Risk)

Why a tax advantage for carried interest continues.  (New Yorker also Private Equity Beat)

An interview with the always interesting James Montier.  (Simoleon Sense)

On the benefits of regulatory vagueness.  “Like firemen, regulators confronting a financial emergency must have the freedom and the tools to do what they need to do.”  (The Epicurean Dealmaker)

“At its best, the econo-blogosphere can be the last haven of truly independent, non-captured, and crucially, informed, commentary able to affect policy and opinion makers positively. It used to do just that.”  (Ultimi Barbarorum)

Felix Salmon, “Big mainstream-media publications, when they hire people to write their blogs, generally hire people with no blogging experience at all — something which is both ill-conceived and dangerous. Some journalists make good bloggers; most don’t.”  (Reuters)

Transparency is the new alpha.  (Howard Lindzon)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.

Just because the VIX is  well below 20 does not mean investors are “complacent.”  (Barron’s)

The VIX methodology is taking over the world.  (CME Group)

The state of market sentiment at week-end.  (Trader’s Narrative, The Technical Take)

The market has moved on from a long list of possible negatives.  Should you?  (The Reformed Broker)

A surprising comparison of the yields on bonds and equities.  (SurlyTrader)

Apple (AAPL) could soon pass Wal-Mart (WMT) in market cap.  (Tech Trader Daily)

How one trader won while trading very little.  (WSJ)

Four reasons to be bullish on Google (GOOG).  (Silicon Alley Insider)

Why the financial industry thrives on complexity.  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

David Merkel, “There is no net hedging in the market.  At the end of the day, the world is 100% net long with itself.  Every asset is owned by someone, regardless of the synthetic exposures that are overlaid on the system.”  (Aleph Blog)

Don’t kid yourself, the new shorting regulations will not prevent a stock or the market from declining.  (Barron’s)

The shorts had nothing to do with the collapse in Citigroup (C) stock.  (FT Alphaville)

A blueprint to move Wall Street forward by looking back.  (TheDeal)

Reform, not stimulus, is the way forward for the US economy.  (Infectious Greed)

Steve Randy Waldman, “This never was just a financial crisis. It was, and is, an economic and political crisis, and we are only a very short way down the path towards resolving it.”  (Interfluidity)

An employment chart round-up.  (Big Picture)

“The bottom line is that payroll figures are much better than they appear at first glance. Red Alert! The markets don’t know this.”  (The Money Game)

The US economy is in transition from the bubble economy.  Will we make the right decisions?  (Clusterstock)

Robert Shiller, “But what is the long-term justification for putting taxpayers on the line to subsidize homeownership?”  (NYTimes)

Consumer credit is finally growing again.  (Atlantic Business)

Iceland wants no part of a deal to reimburse bank losses.  (Felix Salmon, Telegraph)

Gretchen Morgenson should probably skip this post.  (Stone Street Advisors also Felix Salmon)

Reducing executive pay to a single number is a fool’s errand.  (WSJ)

Why Harry Markopolos is one of the “weirdly authentic” heroes of the financial crisis.  (NYMag)

Are regulators trying to kill retail forex trading?  (Clusterstock)

Can high frequency finance turn economics into a hard science?  (voxEU)

Charles Kirk, “..I really encourage you to find and explore new and creative ways to make trading and investing fun especially with others who share similar interests.”  (Kirk Report)

Silicon Alley is back.  (NYTimes)

Kevin Kelleher, “All it will take is one big deal to start a wave of web mergers. It might not even come from Google or Microsoft.”  (GigaOM)

Marc Andreesen thinks big media needs to “burn the boats” and commit wholeheartedly to the open Web.  (TechCrunch)

John Gruber, “Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.” (Daring Fireball)

Without even knowing it you may be an accidental curator.  (Silicon Alley Insider)

Abnormal Returns Now is the real-time component of this site.  Check it out.