Filed under: International markets, Other issues, Rumors, Rants and raves, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Apple Inc (AAPL), Ford Motor (F), India, Private equity, Scandals, Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Merrill Lynch (MER), Oil, Headline news, Bear Stearns Cos (BSC), Federal Reserve, Recession

Every day another story about our recession and the related fallout pops up. Are we in a recession or not? Or will we just teeter on the edge? The debate continues between those anal retentive types that must see all the actual facts, and those that see the signs all around and proclaim that “if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then by golly…”

The Federal Reserve Board has acted as if we are in a recession. They sit on one side of the teeter totter lowering interest rates to counter balance the weak economy and moderate the impact of potential negative growth. Clearly they are throwing ballast off a sinking ship.

There has been much debate recently about the Fed’s dramatic bailout of The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. (NYSE: BSC) with the cooperation and maybe hand rubbing of JP Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM). Some feel Bear Stearns should have been allowed to collapse and others feel that the Fed had no choice in the matter and was not protecting BSC, but the overall confidence in world financial markets.

I take the latter position because I think it’s self evident that BSC’s rapid fall two weeks ago was simply a modern day run on the bank, one resulting from a lack of confidence. The Federal Reserve has an imperative to maximize market confidence. Maybe Bear Stearns falls to it’s doom by itself and maybe it is the first in a series of dominoes. Those that say let it collapse are proponents of taking a risk that might start an unstoppable tidal wave of financial ruin.

You could no more let BSC go bankrupt than you can wait to see the two consecutive quarters of negative growth before taking recession watch action. It is interesting that some wizards would take action in one case but not the other without seeing the contradiction in their positions. Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) and Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (NYSE: MER) are not out of the woods yet. Both companies had such nightmare investments in their portfolios that they had to clean house at the top by firing their chief executive officers. They certainly have some of the same ailments of Bear Stearns and resemble big dominoes in my eyes.

Unemployment is going up. On Wall Street and there is no debate about that. On the other hand on the west coast, the housing market is having a crippling effect on parts of the economy, and the State budget is a disaster. The only thing this has not affected is the tech sector and Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), with its CEO Steve Jobs. Apple has mountains of cash and a strong product line, and has sworn to maintain full employment and expand R&D no matter what. The tech sector may be down in 2008 in terms of sagging stock prices but jobs seem to be stable — both Steve Jobs and your tech job.

What is not stable is the price of oil, as oil dips to $106 on renewed flows from Iraq pipeline, or gold with its own bubble which are near all time highs. They were showing signs of temporary softness earlier in the week but that’s nothing a good war like the one in Iraq cannot sway in a moments notice.

While Wall Street suffers in the east and housing suffers in the west, Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) has been busy hoping to minimize their employee and shareholder suffering by selling off Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors ADR (NYSE: TTM) of India. I am not sure which will help them more: the infusion of $1.7 billion or simply having a few less things on their plate to worry about.

Consumer confidence is down, no surprise, the market has been mostly up lately… which is a big surprise. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) remains a center of attention as the guessing game about earnings growth and the value of a click continue and while that remains big news, even bigger news, the acquisition of Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) has gone silent. And the silence is deafening. Are they hammering out a deal?

Recession or not, the market will remain very active and the guessing games will go on. Have a good week end. Hopefully the Fed can take a rest so that we might too.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. Disclosure: We own shares in BSC & TTM.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 5:12 am and is filed under Stocks News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.