In between scoldings, Buffett told investors more damage lay ahead and dropped hints about where Berkshire is looking for purchases abroad as the dollar falls."
Not tell the truth?

Lambasted the credit raters?

Oh, you mean like Moodys, which Berkshire holds a huge position in? Tell me Warren, if you're so concerned about Moodys, how is it that with 20% of the stock under Berkshire's control you haven't either divested yourself of that holding or started a proxy fight to get the clowns running that joint out of there?

The key is to "watch what they do, not what they say." And in Berkshire's case that means paying attention to the fact that they have profited tremendously from the "intentional inefficiencies" in the market - that is, lying.

That has made Berkshire a lot of money, and I don't see him giving any of it back to those who got screwed. While this may be ok if you're a Berkshire stockholder, its not so good for everyone else. (As an aside, Berkshire stock is off about 2% today; given the size of the miss its surprising the street carnage wasn't worse.)

ResCap says that in June they may default on their obligations:

"ResCap, the eighth-largest U.S. residential lender in 2007, today began offering as little as 80 cents on the dollar to exchange or buy back $14 billion of bonds to extend maturities and stave off bankruptcy. To finance the restructuring, ResCap is seeking a new $3.5 billion credit facility from GMAC.

'There is a significant risk that we will not be able to meet our debt service obligations, be unable to meet certain financial covenants in our credit facilities, and be in a negative liquidity position in June 2008,' ResCap said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission today. "

The credit crunch is over? We've seen the worst of the risk from mortgage exposure to financial companies? Uh, perhaps you can explain why the words "stave off bankruptcy" are in that little ditty?

UBS comes out with a $11 billion first-quarter loss and says they may lay off 8,000 people. Given that last year they made about $3 billion in profit, this is quite impressive - a year's worth of profit in losses in one quarter? That's gotta hurt when you sit down:

"'UBS is scaling down investment banking,' including reducing trading bets and giving up off-balance sheet units, said Frankfurt-based Landsbanki Kepler analyst Dirk Becker, who advises clients to 'reduce' holdings of UBS. It is 'realistic' to estimate that the company will fire one tenth of its 83,000 employees overall, he said."

Getting rid of off-balance sheet exposure is a net positive over time, but the key question for today is "where is the value on these stocks?"

That is, what is the native earnings power of an investment bank when they can't play the games that have goosed returns for the last dozen years?

Federal Prosecutors are turning up the heat in the subprime mess; saying:

"The U.S. attorney for the office, Benton J. Campbell, who supervises about 150 prosecutors, said the group will look into potential crimes ranging from mortgage fraud by brokers to securities fraud, insider trading and accounting fraud."

Yeah, ok. I'll believe it when I see it.

The fact of the matter is that The Feds preempted state regulation of mortgage initiation during the bubble years, and no amount of attempting to hide from the record will succeed on that count. Nor is the record on the SEC's misfeasance open to serious question; they have turned into a lapdog of the highest order, going from being a regulator to an organization that hands out Lewinskis to anyone on Wall Street who asks.

Indeed the SEC's latest "dislike" of the short-selling hedge-fund community is particularly curious, given that during the entirety of 2007 the game was to start false rumors that were positive, after buying huge numbers of CALL options. This was widely reported almost on a daily basis in the media and yet nothing was done about it.

But when some short-sellers buy a lot of PUT options and then go after Bear Stearns, that's worthy of a criminal investigation.

I personally believe that all market manipulation needs to be investigated and, when the law was broken, prosecuted. This applies to both "short" and "long" rumors, not just those that cause price declines.

Of course that would mean locking up half the hedge fund and investment bank population in New York.

Deutsche Telekom is allegedly looking into buying Sprint/Nextel. I'm not sure how that works out, given the wide differences in the protocol and plant that both systems use. Sprint/Nextel use PCS and iDEN, while DT's T-Mobile is a GSM-based system. While GSM is headed to "3g" (and is in fact being rolled out "silently" now, if field reports I have are to be believed) exactly where this leaves Sprint/Nextel in terms of its plant is less clear.