Free Republic

Updated at 8 p.m. ET: NEW YORK - A suspected terrorist parked a van packed with what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb next to the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan and tried to detonate it Wednesday morning before he was arrested in a terror sting operation, authorities said. The suspect, 21-year-old Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, is a Bangladeshi national who came to the U.S. on a student visa in January for the specific purpose of launching a terror attack here, authorities said. He allegedly told an undercover agent last month that he hoped the attack would disrupt...

Wondering why the ES is soaring? Because the NYSE just broke, too. NASDAQ HAS DECLARED SELF HELP AGAINST NYSE ARCA (ARCA) NASDAQ DECLARES SELF HELP AGAINST NYSE ARCA AS/OF 15:26:42 E.T NYSE ARCA HAVING DIFFICULTY PROCESSING OUTBOUND TAPE C QUOTES And BATS too: BATS HAS DECLARED SELF-HELP AGAINST ANOTHER MARKET CENTER BATS SAYS ROUTING TO NYSE ARCA HAS BEEN SUSPENDED AS OF 15:39 An absolute circus meant only to preserve confidence in a rigged, manipulated system based on incorrect electronic trades.

Sooner or later the Federal Reserve will have to turn off the spigot called Quantitative Easing (QE). And the stock market seems to think it’s better sooner rather than later, because you can only go so long with bad news masquerading as good news. Concern over an early QE exit by the Fed receded early this week as the U.S. ISM Manufacturing plunged to 49.0 in May. Over the last two months, persistent rumors about the end of “riskless-trading,” created under the deluge of central bank created liquidity, have translated into a market where the internals breadth and depth do...

As George W. Bush mounts a strong comeback in the polls, stock market averages are mounting their own stealth recovery. There’s a clear link here. Should the president be reelected, tax-rates on capital will stay low and may even drop some more. Wall Street likes this. Bush’s concept of tax reform is focused on reducing the multiple taxation of saving and investment. Under current law the same dollar of income is taxed once as work effort, a second time as corporate earnings, a third time as dividends, a fourth time as capital gains, and a fifth time as inheritance. This...