Gather Ye Rosebuds…

I love it when I come out and say (admit?)
I’m bullish , as I did on Tuesday, and then the stock
market surges higher the very next day.

As an aside, sentiment towards stocks seems so negative, and it seems so
fashionable to be bearish, I feel a bit like a renegade when I say I’m
bullish. Still, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m blindly
bullish. There are legitimate concerns about budget deficits, for
instance. And I wonder how the Fed will reverse QE2 when the time comes
to do it next year.

But we’ll keep monitoring the tea leaves and
checking which way the wind is blowing. Major market events are rarely
out-of-the-blue occurrences. There are always signs. And major trends
take months, if not years to unfold.

We’ll stay focused on the tea leaves, but we won’t
quit our day job. It is time to gather
ye rosebuds, while ye may…

For anyone feeling nostalgic, the Fed gave us a look back at the financial
crisis when it revealed which companies tapped emergency lending programs
set up by the Fed.

The Fed had resisted releasing this data. I can
understand why, you don’t want to point the finger at which banks were
worse off. But ignoring the truth is no way to live, the truth, as they
say, will set you free.

The largest recipient of emergency loans wasn’t even
a U.S. bank. It was UBS (NYSE:UBS), at $74 billion. Bloomberg reports that amount was twice what
Citigroup received (NYSE: C), and Citi was the biggest
U.S. borrower.
Barclay’s, of London, borrowed the lump sum of $47 billion on September 18, 2008.

(Readers may recall that Lehman Bros declared bankruptcy, and Bank of
America (NYSE:BAC) bought out Merrill Lynch on September 15, 2008. Coincidence that
Barclay’s bought the Lehman Brothers wreckage a few days later? I don’t
think so…)

For anyone that says that the financial crisis
wasn