It’s Friday, and the markets continue to ignore a weakening economy and focus on possible interest rate cuts:   U.S. stock futures rose on Friday, indicating stocks would open extending gains for a fourth day straight, with neither a speech by from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke nor economic data derailing expectations of interest rate cuts. "Bernanke hinted as much by placing significant emphasis on the recent deterioration in consumer spending and on signs of softening in labor market conditions, as well as financial conditions, which appear to have sealed the deal on a rate cut and raised the possibility…
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Hat tip to M for this one from the Arizona Republic this morning- the Arizona Department of Financial Institutions, the mortgage regulator for the state of Arizona, has a mountain of fraud complaints, but no money to tackle them: Arizona’s mortgage regulator has shut down a handful of Valley firms for fraud and other illegal lending practices this year, but at least 40 other investigations are stalled because there is no money to fund them. A wave of mortgage fraud and other bad lending practices that spread across metro Phoenix led to a record number of consumer complaints against mortgage…
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I’m not generally inclined to cite Cramer, but when he’s right, he’s right. [Many thanks to Jim Baird for forwarding me his article yesterday.] Baird says of Cramer: Jim Cramer, the boo-yah yelling financial advisor of CNBC’s Mad Money, recently left Wall Street and went out to California. What he saw there was a housing market in full-blown crisis. Touring the Inland Empire, Cramer viewed the decimation created by the current housing and mortgage meltdown: in street after street, neighborhood after neighborhood the homes sat with no buyers. The only noticeable occupants were the mosquito’s whose eggs found safe harbor…
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