links for 2010-04-13

Through a new partnership with an Internet company that specializes in personalized shopping, MasterCard is set to introduce a Web shopping mall on Monday that it says can pinpoint with considerable accuracy what its cardholders are likely to purchase.

The site, called MasterCard Marketplace, relies on technology developed by Next Jump, a New York company that monitors customer behavior from thousands of retailers and uses the data it gathers to help merchants tailor their product offerings.

Once the nation's largest thrift, Washington Mutual became a Main Street bank in search of Wall Street profits. It's a quest that led employees to engage fraud, and ultimately led to WaMu's failure in September of 2008, a Senate subcommittee alleges. Along the way, the thrift infected the secondary mortgage market with billions of dollars in bad loans.

Even if you assume that just half of the current 7.4 million currently delinquent mortgages fit this sort of ’spending profile’ (that is, they are spending their mortgage) and you assume a $1,000 median monthly mortgage payment for most U.S. homeowners — you get a $3.7 billion boost per month to consumer spending. It’s certainly enough spending to matter in the overall scheme of things.

I do not necessarily see this as a sign of complacency or as a sign of an imminent market downturn. Rather, I suspect that U.S. stocks are not seeing major capital flows, as traders and investors perceive greater global, macroeconomic opportunity elsewhere: in the perceived safety of high yields and the growth stories of emerging markets.