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Evergreen Solar and Solyndra Fail: Is Wall Street's Hatred of the Solar Industry Still "Irrational?" | Alternative Energy Stocks Much has been made this week about the nearly contemporaneous bankruptcy filings of two American solar companies, Silicon Valley’s Solyndra and Evergreen Solar (formerly ESLR) out of Massachusetts. These two had something in common: Both made … Read more

Obama signs patent reform bill – CNN.com "We have to do everything we can to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit wherever we find it," Obama said at a signing ceremony at a high school in Arlington, Virginia. This measure "cuts away the red tape that slows down our inventors and entrepreneurs." (tags: patents patent_law Obama reform)

Census: 1 in 6 Americans living in poverty  | ajc.com The ranks of the nation's poor swelled to nearly 1 in 6 people last year, reaching a new high as long-term unemployment woes left millions of Americans struggling and out of work. The number of uninsured edged up to 49.9 million, the biggest in over … Read more

Popping the gold bubble theory – Bill Fleckenstein – MSN Money it recently occurred to me that virtually no one who recognized the tech-stock and/or real-estate bubble now says that gold is a bubble. In fact, almost all of us who identified those bubbles long before they burst actually own gold, and have for quite … Read more

Swiss Franc Peg – Swiss Central Bank Move 'Huge Mistake': Jim Rogers – CNBC The move "will work for a while, but the market will have more money in the end than the SNB," Rogers, who was the co-founder of the Quantum Fund with George Soros, told CNBC.com. The Swiss central bank risks losing "a … Read more

The Great Bank Robbery – Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Spitznagel – Project Syndicate …banks take risks, get paid for the upside, and then transfer the downside to shareholders, taxpayers, and even retirees. In order to rescue the banking system, the Federal Reserve, for example, put interest rates at artificially low levels; as was disclosed … Read more

Short Selling Against S&P 500 Highest Since Nov. – Bloomberg The proportion of S&P 500 shares outstanding sold short on Aug. 29 rose to 3.03 percent, the most since the end of November and up from 2.37 percent at the beginning of August, according to New York-based Data Explorers, which provides research on short sales … Read more

Swiss Fear the End of Economic Paradise – ABC News Switzerland's economy wouldn't be able to cope with it if the euro dipped below 1.1 francs, Sturm warns. For this reason, the Swiss National Bank has attempted to get the franc back to a reasonable level by flooding the market with freshly printed money and … Read more

Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem? – NYTimes.com Grantham has often been early, the besetting sin of the value investor. Sounding the alarm and bailing out well before the peak of one bubble after another has cost him profits and clients. But if he’s right again and early again in identifying rising commodity prices­ … Read more