January 8, 2013 Update

DJIA:13,384 NASDAQ:3,098 10-YR TRS: 3/32 yield 1.904% Oil:$93.19 EURO:$1.3117 YEN:87.79

Micro

• Earnings: Alcoa Inc. (NYSE:AA) forecast Q4 EPS of $0.06 per share, Am IHS Inc. (NYSE:IHS) Q4 EPS of $1.21 beating forecast by $0.10.
• AIG (NYSE:AIG) is considering joining old CEO Maurice Greenberg’s venture to sue the US in a $25B lawsuit arguing the violation of the Fifth Amendment and depriving shareholders of tens of billions of dollars when the government took a 92% stake.
• Bloomberg has discovered a secret division within Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) that uses the bank’s capital to invest in stocks and bonds. The Multi-Strategy Investing group has no clients and raises questions regarding Lloyd Blankfein’s statement in July that Goldman does not get involved in proprietary trading. 
• Merck’s (NYSE: MRK) CEO Kenneth Frazier declared that he is interested in acquiring Bausch & Lomb (who values themselves at a minimum of $10B).
• Sears’ (NASDAQ:SHLD) CEO Louis D’Ambrosio announced that due to family health issues he will be stepping down. Edward Lampert will be succeeding him, who will also remain Sears’ chairman.  
• The Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas begins today and runs until Friday. Drawing attention to inventions by Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:INTC), Qualcomm Inc. (NASDAQ:QCOM), Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD), and Panasonic Corp. (NYSE:PC).

Macro

• SPZ: trading lower as investors fear the start of the fourth-quarter earnings season and await data on small-business optimism and consumer credit spending. 
• Asian Markets: in the red as investors worry about the start of the US earnings season. 
• European Markets: trading in a tight spread as investors remain weary as the earnings season begins. 
• The National Federation of Independent Business will release it’s small-business-optimism index for December at 7:30am, November’s data was the absolute worst from March 2010.
• The Federal Reserve will release consumer-credit data for November at 3:00 pm, led by student and car loans. In October credit grew 2.6% ($14.2B).
• Italian unemployment for November remains unchanged from October’s 11.1%, which is below the forecast of 11.2%. Youth unemployment is an all time high of 37.1%. 
• France has narrowed its trade deficit €4.3B in November from €4.7B in October with exports of pharmaceuticals remain strong as industrial exports drop. 
• Australia’s trade deficit has reached the largest level in almost five years in November to A$2.64B ($2.77B) from A$2.44B in October. 

Celebrating the Dwindle of Human Thought

Starting today and ending on Friday, January 11th, The Las Vegas Convention Center will be hosting the International Consumer Electronic Show- a techie convention giving a combination of publicly traded and start-up companies the chance to show off their newest inventions. Among the electronic innovations is the Hapifork, an eating utensil that vibrates when the consumer eats too quickly. Created in an attempt to curb obesity by slowing down the rate in which humans consume food, the invention is utterly insulting to mankind and counterproductive. Hapifork gives users the ability to program the eating rate that triggers vibrations, but if the user lacks self-control the probability users will use discipline to allow a fork to restrain themselves is low. As the inventor, Jacques Lepine, explained, “You can be told to eat slowly but you usually forget. This way, your mind doesn’t have to do the work.” Why are so many afraid to let their minds work? Technological advances that make the user mentally and emotionally dependent during the process of self improvement is similar to carrying around a guardian. They are just another nagging voice reinforcing right from wrong. At some point, humanity needs to get their skin in the game and think for themselves. Although knowledge is never wasted, one has to wonder how much technology is actually helping mankind if is it simply discouraging, reversing, and slowing down human thought. It will be interesting to see the other intentions CES has to offer...