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Buying AZN is the best way to play enhance if you didn't short MRK and SGP

Even more fall out today from the Enhance trial at the ACC today.

Smartypig is a new company that launched several weeks ago and it has already generated a lot of buzz. It bills itself as a social savings site. Best of all, it has a very competitive savings rate.

I feel like such a downer lately. Here's some info from the Fed that shows that after inflation, the net worth of Americans fell for the first time since 2002. Here's my opinion on what needs to happen before we can start growing again. There are some pretty big economic issues that have to be sorted out before growth can continue: 1) End spending - war on Iraq 2) suffer through mortgage bubble - There's not getting around this. The bubble is going to need to pop and the sooner the better.

Much has been made of the SocGen blow-up and the trader who overstepped his authority to cause a $7.2 billion loss by betting all of the bank's capital. This is increasingly looking like the story of a 30 year-old low-level trader who just kept raising the ante in order to gain recognition.

The sub-prime crisis and the credit crunch are about the failure of a lending system creating by Wall Street. Instead of banks keeping loans on their balance sheets, they pooled them and sold them off in the form of bonds and other securitized investments. Banks can only lend based on the amount of equity (deposits, cash, etc.) they have on their balance sheet. By removing the loans from their balance sheet, they created more space to do more lending. This phenomena has ended.

While Merck and Schering Plough have already fallen hard, they should both continue to fall for the forseeable future

Apple's immediate prognosis is scary, and I'm inclined to wait until it gets much lower.

It is quickly becoming an American pastime to bash Bernanke, but I think that he is acting responsibly.

Ignore the media hype. This entire nominating process is over. It is now time to focus on the global economic meltdown and on football.

The Street journalist Doug Kass (he's also the founder and president of Seabreeze Partners Management, Inc.) says that financials are cheap and poised to rebound. He may be right but I'm not going close to them. I'm not convinced things aren't going to get worse before they get better.

Merck and Schering Plough has finally released the ENHANCE trial. The results were bad- and the cover up was worse. Look out for falling stocks. Timber....

Bank of America's acquisition of Countrywide is a good acquisition for the latter's employees (and for those who bought the latter's stock two days ago). It also stops the knock-on effects of the mortgage meltdown. But, it is potential disaster for Bank of America.

Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Merrill Lynch & Co, may be forced to write down an additional $34 billion in assets related to the subprime mortgage collapse. The irony is that an analyst from Goldman Sachs is making the prediction.