Looks like that Peter Brimelow column we linked to this morning was dead on. Gold up. Dollar down.
And with that, the DealBreakers are just about DFD. Write-offs up next.

Gold prices climbed 1.4 percent on Friday on a weaker dollar, with the absence of U.S. players making the market choppy, dealers said.
Platinum also gained, but traded well below this week’s record high of $1,395 an ounce on talk of an exchange traded fund (ETF). Other precious metals followed gold’s upward move.
“The market is trying to get up to $640 an ounce at some point, but there are some sell orders around there,” said a precious metals trader in London.
“The dollar is weak at the moment. The market is fairly thin so it didn’t take a huge amount to move it up,” he added.
Spot gold was quoted at $639.30/640.30 an ounce by 1453 GMT, up from $630.30/631.30 late in London on Thursday.

Gold moves higher as weaker dollar spurs buying [Reuters]

Daniel Gross at Slate writes:

This year is shaping up to be a record for both leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks. According to Thomson Financial, buyouts worth $334.5 billion have been announced or completed so far this year, up from $115 billion for all of last year. According to Standard & Poor’s, members of the S&P 500 Index spent $325.15 billion on their own shares in the first three quarters of 2006 and have spent more than $674 billion since Jan. 1, 2005. Between buybacks and buyouts, that’s more than $1.1 trillion of stock taken out of public hands in less than two years.

The Mystery of the Disappearing Stocks

Kevin Duffy of Bearing Asset Management has a column on Lew Rockwell’s site laying out lots and lots of example of, uhm, irrational exuberance about the market. It’s not so much the optimism that’s making him nervous but about the ubiquity of the optimism.

Never confuse a stampeding herd with the facts. Only in a bubble can the majority – utterly intolerant of dissent – delude itself into believing it is in the dissenting minority. We’re not sure whether such behavior is disingenuous or simply dysfunctional. Perhaps the old saw applies: “When everyone is thinking alike, no one is really thinking.”

Sell Dow 12,000 [LewRockwell.com]

A few years ago, when we were younger and stupider, we predicted the death of sell-side analysis (citing RegFD, access to data, etc) half-joking suggesting that it would be reclassified as “marketing”. And then sell-side analysis stubbornly refused to die, much to our disappointment. But Paul Kedrosky suggests that the end is near and Lehman’s already removing the feeding tube:

When is an equity analyst not an equity analyst? Apparently when they work at Lehman. That’s because Lehman is moving some analysts to the trading desk and calling them “desk analysts”… Unlike normal analysts, these desk analysts can give on-the-fly recs, don’t publish research, and aren’t bound by new SEC dislosure regulations. While a cynic would call this a way to end-run regulation, I think it an overdue change. Let’s stop pretending that equity analysts can operate in a some rarified world separate from how their income is generated (i.e., trading). Analyst are salespeople. Always have been, always will be.

When Is An Analyst Not An Analyst [Infectious Greed]

In keeping with our continuing coverage of the “New, New Economy” we have begun collecting a series of mergers and acquisitions analysis and valuation tools. Cumulatively, we expect these will give the modern investment banker a goodly number of financial arrows in her quiver. On Tuesday, we formalized the Idov Multiple. Today we bring you the Kanige Chaos Theory of M&A due diligence.
(You’re welcome.)
Eventually, we expect that bankers who do not have these tools will be left behind in the fast-paced financial world, shortfalling $200 million dollar valuations of commerciablog firms and executing poorly vetted $500 million acquisitions of bricks and mortar publishing firms silly enough to sign a teenaged author.

CNBC, for lack of Morning Call programming, is currently showing a documentary about everyone’s favorite big box punching bag titled “The Age of Wal-Mart.” As far as we’re concerned, Target is Wal-Mart with better branding and packaging, but you’ll never see an “Age of Target” documentary. Our theory is that anti-Wal-Mart sentiment has more to do with class warfare and perception than fundamentals and that the same is true of many companies.
So when we’re not clear on where a company stands PR-wise, we go to one the more fashionable ‘burbs of NYC and find ourselves a hipster (hipsters, above left) and ask them what they think about a particular company. Hipsters make for an interesting litmus test because they pride themselves on non-conformity but have fairly homogenous tastes and value systems. We can’t decide if media perception is reflective of their value systems or they’re simply reflecting mainstream media perceptions, but the correlation seems to be very high. The conversation always goes something like this:
DealBreaker: Would you ever, under any circumstances, set foot in a Wal-Mart?
Hipster: (Glaring) Are you fucking kidding me? If I wanted to be exploited, I’d move to, like, the Bronx or something. Wait. Are you wearing Brooks Brothers? Like, unironically?
DB: Uh, okay. What about Target?
Hipster: (Glances around to see if other hipsters are within earshot). Yeah, sure. I got some rad socks there last week. I’m going to wear them as gloves.
DB: Right. Moving on. What you consider the fundamental difference between Wal-Mart and Target?
Hipster:… You know what? I’m not going to answer your little bourgeois questions. Get out of my borough, yuppie.
DB: How about Exxon?
Hipster: Fuck off.
The Age of Wal-Mart [CNBC]

ThinkBlog demonstates the importance of compound interest by calculating whether Peter Minuit got a good deal on the island of Manhattan in 1626. Their explanation and handy charticle:

To understand the magic of compound interest, in 1626, Dutchman Peter Minuit purchased the entire island of Manhattan for $24 from the Wappinger Indians… Compound interest has been called the eighth wonder of the world and with the help of the ninth wonder of the world, the HP 12C, we can calculate whether Peter Minuit got a good deal or not.

And if Donald Trump had been around to borrow the $24…
The Power of Growth [ThinkBlog]

Nothing says Silicon Alley-is-back like the proliferation of me-too products that no one uses. Case in point: StockDigg and Flogz. (And nothing says 1998-is-here-again like the proliferation of nonsensical business names that end in “z” rather than “s”.)
Digg.com, for those of you who are more Web 0.5 than Web 2.0, is a website that allows users to save links and ranks them according to popularity. It has been shamelessly ripped off and repurposed for the finance sector by people who think that the sector will embrace the technology despite a historical tendency to respond to new technologies by laughing maniacally and running away. Or living in denial as if it were St. Tropez. (Floor specialists, I’m talking to you.)
So far Flogz seems to have between 8 and 10 actual users and StockDigg appears to have a couple hundred.