“Bob Farrell was a legend at Merrill Lynch & Co. for several decades. Farrell had a front-row seat to the go-go markets of the late 1960s, mid-1980s and late 1990s, the brutal bear market of 1973-74, and October 1987′s crash. He retired as chief stock market analyst at the end of 1992, but continued to occasionally publish. Rumor has it for a humongous donation to Farrell’s favorite charity, you can get on his very exclusive email list. Marketwatch gathered some of Farrell’s more famous observations, and republished them as 10 Market Rules to Remember.” – via The Big Picture

An interesting piece of analysis via TBP about rising gas prices crowding out retail and industrial consumption. The premise is sound but fails to acknowledge the already stimulative effect of a $2.50 decline in prices from their 2008 peak…

Noted financial blogger Barry Ritholtz comments on macroeconomic housekeeping, the unexplored links between shrinking demand and credit-starved supply, and support for commodities and commodity-linked markets/currencies once institutional capital resumes its existential search for yield…

While many observers are still consumed by the economic complexities of the financial crisis, historians have been busy making predictions about the ominous geopolitical implications of a destabilized global economy, rising unemployment, falling incomes, and swelling ethnic tensions. Much like its individual citizens, countries in the aggregate tend to retrench in the face of uncertainty about the future, and that could lead to some dangerously myopic decision-making in the months and years ahead…

“The human mind cannot grasp the causes of phenomena in the aggregate. But the need to find these causes is inherent in man’s soul. And the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions of phenomena, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, snatches at the first, the most intelligible approximation to a cause, and says: ‘This is the cause!’ ”
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book IV, Part 2, Chapter 1, first paragraph

Contagion could be used to describe much of the activity in the capital markets over the last 40 years, as global financial flows have accelerated, trade and capital barriers have disappeared, regulatory oversight has diminished, and financial innovation has made the packaging and sale of securities as easy as ordering a Big Mac combo. From defaults on recycled petrodollars in the early 1980s, to the Mexican peso crisis in 1994, to the “Asian Contagion” in 1997-98, and most recently the Great Collapse of 2008, what began as sanity checks on asset values and risk metrics quickly evolved into stampedes of herding capital feeling to higher ground.

“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message…”