Business

Nine firefighters were injured when an apparent natural gas explosion destroyed two buildings in a Seattle neighborhood early on Wednesday morning. Two commercial buildings were leveled after the gas explosion south of Greenwood Avenue North at85th Avenue North. The cause of the blast, which was heard miles away from the site, is under investigation. RT reports: The explosion occurred around 1:45am Pacific time on Wednesday morning in the northern Greenwood neighborhood after fire crews responded to calls of a natural gas leak made 40 minutes earlier.

Echoing the less than exuberant credit market and confirming Jeff Gundlach's (and former Fed President Dick Fisher), infamous short-seller Muddy Waters' Carson Block told Reuters that the recent rally in the U.S. stock market feels like a "dead cat bounce."

"I would say that this does feel like it is a dead cat bounce because how much more ammunition really do policymakers have?"

It seems the market was listening...

Will 1980 hold up again?

Submitted by Nick Cuningham via OilPrice.com,

The largest oil companies are struggling to balance competing objectives with dramatically lower revenues compared to previous years.

Just two months ago, former Fed President Dick Fisher admitted that "The Fed front-loaded an enormous market rally in order to create a wealth effect." Today he is back, taking a victory lap onthe 7th anniversary of the crisis lows by explaining, rather stunningly, to CNBC that "we injected cocaine and heroin into the system" to enable a wealth effect (that he admits did not work, despite its success in raising asset prices), and "now we are maintaining it with ritalin." Fisher also confirmed his previous warning that "The Fed is a gian

While most western central bankers are slowly, if grudgingly, admitting that everything they have done since the start of the "most hated rally in history" has been to create precisely this rally (also explaining why it remains so deeply "hated" as none of it is in any remote way natural) at least in Hungary they are dead honest from the onset, that when it comes to propping up the economy it all starts (and ends) with the stock market.