The ‘hockey stick‘ graph produced by Michael Mann, at Penn State may have suffered the final blow to its credibility. As more original data sets are released to the public and other scientists and statisticians have the opportunity to recreate Mann’s work, their findings are lacking the distinct 20th century uptick in temperatures. But at [...]

Paul Kedrosky, author of the Infectious Greed Blog and a Bloomberg contributing editor, talks about the outlook for Facebook Inc.’s initial public offering. Kedrosky speaks with Erik Schatzker, Stephanie Ruhle, Scarlet Fu and Sara Eisen on Bloomberg Television’s “InsideTrack.” Source: Bloomberg May 17 2012

With a half hour to go in today’s trading session, over one million put contracts have already been traded on the S&P 500 index, which is about 2 ½ times the average daily volume. This elevated put volume comes on top of 913,000 SPX put contracts yesterday, which was the second highest for 2012. The one million level is rarely seen in SPX puts and generally indicates an extreme amount of hedging on the part of institutional investors, as well as increased speculative activity.

Major global banks are advising clients to prepare for a stock market rally and a resurgence of the euro if Greece is forced out of monetary union, betting that world authorites will flood the international system with liquidity.