Market comments for Nov. 11th: Grantham video on CNBC

Yes, if you do nothing more today than listen to this video clip of Jeremy Grantham, Chairman of Grantham Van Otterloo, one of the most respected investment firms, you will not regret it. He manages over $100 Billion in assets and was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on CNBC.

The market is down about 105 points on the Cisco news today. The Put to Call ratio was only about 0.90 this morning and has since gone lower to 0.83 as of this moment. It surely is not causing a stampede to buy Puts, so this market is still too confident of the Fed in my view and irrational.

They knew this Financial crisis was coming in 2004

This is a NY Times article and a must read as to how we got in this financial mess. Readers will be as surprised as I was. Here are a few excerpts and a link to the entire article:

"How could Mr. Cox (SEC Chairman) have been so wrong?

Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.

On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks.

They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary."

To read the entire article click here.