Name another country...

While the rest of the world prevaricates, U.S. companies are taking this opportunity of "lowered" expectations to expose all the skeletons in their collective closets.

This is nothing to fear. The U.S. can slash, burn, and grow again while the other more ossified nations conceal and confirm their ineptitude. Name another country that has this kind of transparency and public excoriation of its appointed officials (such as the SEC hearings today)

I am becoming more and more bullish beginning in the late 1st quarter.

http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/losses-mount-up/

February 4, 2009, 12:31 PM
Losses Mount Up
This just in: The Standard & Poor’s 500 is on its way to the first quarter it has had — the data goes back to 1936 — in which the companies in it will report overall losses rather than profits.

Howard Silverblatt, S.&P.’s index maven, reports that with almost three-quarters of the companies in the index having reported fourth-quarter numbers, the loss per S.&P. share is now $6.32. Most of that is write-offs, not operating losses, of course, and over all the companies are reporting operating profits. But the write-offs are not just in the banks. Time Warner’s big hit for writing off its AOL folly is one example.