Market Talk

My wife and I have in the past occasionally watched the ABC show “Extreme Makeover.” It always seemed amazing to me that the show was giving these down-on-their-luck families brand new, gigantic homes, without addressing the problems that made them down on their luck in the first place.

How would these families be able to pay for the new, bigger homes if they couldn’t afford the older, smaller homes? The bubble-gum, cheery, shed-a-tear crew from the show never got into that issue.

The “reality” show always had a whole unreality about it, a very Disneyfied gloss that made it seem like a family’s very real problems could be solved with some Vulcan stove, gaudy decorating and flat-screen TVs in every room.

Apparently, though, a segment on addressing the problems that can’t be solved with flat-screen TVs would’ve helped, as our Dow Jones colleague Dawn Wotapka reports in the Journal:

- Barry Ritholtz breaks down the pros and cons of today’s jobs report.

- It’s going to be hard to climb out of long-term jobless pit. Average length of time jobless folks have been out of work hit record-high 31.2 weeks last month. And the longer they stay unemployed “the worse their chances of finding work become – either because their skills become stale and dated, or because they are stigmatized by the giant hole in their resumes,” NYT’s Economix says.

- Job report’s a step in right direction, but doesn’t represent a “robust return to full employment,” Mark Thoma says. “My expectation is that job growth will be frustratingly slow, but just positive enough to keep our hopes alive.”

- Spike in involuntary part-timers puts damper on jobs report. Number of workers only able to find part-time jobs (or have had their hours cut for economic reasons) “increased sharply to 9.1 million in March,” Calculated Risk notes, from just under 8.8 million in February and 8.3 million in January.

- “What does seem clear is that the pace of net job creation is still well below the levels required to appreciably improve the unemployment rate or to make a sizable step toward regaining the eight million-plus jobs lost since the beginning of the recession,” David Altig writes at Atlanta Fed’s macroblog.

- “All in all, the [jobs] report appears to be of the ‘ugly Goldilocks’ sort – not too hot and not too cold, but just ugly enough under the surface to keep the liquidity pumps fully primed,” Pragmatic Capitalist says.

- Don’t count on lots of free TV on the iPad, Peter Kafka reports. Disney’s (DIS) ABC is the only one of the four major TV networks putting a decent amount of programming on the iPad in time for tomorrow’s launch.

- ISuppli expects Apple (AAPL) to ship 7.1M iPads this year, 14.4M in 2011 and 20.1M in 2012. “Suffice it to say, these scenarios are far more bullish than the ones we’ve heard to date,” Digital Daily blogger John Paczkowski says. “Which is ironic given that iSuppli describes them as ‘conservative.’”

- As sweet as the iPad looks, some question the device’s true purpose and whether it’s worth the price.

- Old media’s expecting too much from iPad, MarketWatch’s John Dvorak says.

- Two big anniversaries on the Street this week – tomorrow is one-year mark since Dow bottomed and Wednesday marks 10-year anniversary of Nasdaq Comp’s all-time closing high.

- Three vacancies currently exist at the Fed: two governors and a vice chairman. To find the proper candidates, FusionIQ CEO Barry Ritholtz offers his own “litmus test” for potential nominees.

- “This never was just a financial crisis,” Interfluidity blogger Steve Randy Waldman writes. “It was, and is, an economic and political crisis, and we are only a very short way down the path towards resolving it.”

- Some financial institutions are dangerously becoming “too big to save,” former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson says.

- “It may take longer to observe the full effect of continued mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures, but we are at about the point where the data would depart from the market’s ‘all clear’ expectations if credit pressures are likely to resume with force,” John Hussman says.

- James Hamilton considers a new financial conditions index that attempts to combine the information of 44 separate series for predicting real GDP growth.

- Government can and should create jobs, Mark Thoma says.

- Tim Geithner’s financial plan is working – and making him very unpopular. “We saved the economy, but we kind of lost the public,” Geithner tells The New Yorker. But MarketBeat wonders if Geithner’s stock is set to rise.

- Nasdaq Comp trading above pre-Lehman levels.

- Google’s testing a new TV programming search service with Dish Network, which runs on Android-powered TV set-top boxes and allows users to search content from Dish and the Web, WSJ reports.

- So much for all the drama surrounding ABC’s blackout on Cablevision. Academy Awards captures biggest audience for ABC in five years.

The latest spat between Disney (DIS) and Cablevision (CVC) prompts some to wonder whether the cable industry will ever embrace an a la carte pricing structure.

The long-running feud between TV broadcasters and cable operators has intensified in recent months. Disney and Cablevision struck a deal last night to restore ABC’s feed to Cablevision subscribers just as the Academy Awards were kicking off. Same sort of dispute occurred a few months ago as talks between Time Warner Cable (TWC) and News Corp (NWS NWSA) went down to the wire, with News Corp threatening to pull access to the Fox network. But the two sides agreed to a last-minute deal on New Year’s Day. (News Corp owns Dow Jones Newswires, publisher of this blog.)

Other disputes haven’t ended without major disputes. The Food Network and HGTV – owned by Scripps Networks (SNI) – were blacked out on Cablevision for three weeks in January before the sides could reach a deal.

The longer these battles between broadcasters and cable operators last, the more likely consumer outrage will increase and FCC “will have the cause it seems to have wanted to require a la carte pricing for cable,” says CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis.

A la carte pricing essentially allows consumers to pick and choose which stations they will pay for instead of paying higher rates for access to hundreds (if not thousands) of stations that most people don’t even watch.

“Then both broadcasters and cable operators and their parent companies will get their just desserts,” he writes. “I will not pay for 90% of the channels I am forced to pay for now. That will reduce revenue to cable. It will mean that many channels will no longer be subsidized. It will kill marginal channels.”

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- “For the last 10 months, as stocks have rallied with only minor interruptions, even the bulls have warned that at some point a ‘correction’ would hit,” LA Times’ Tom Petruno says. “Is this finally it?”

- Not a lot to cheer in NBC Universal’s 4Q results. But don’t worry GE, it’ll all just be a memory soon enough.

- Obama’s bank plans don’t bode well for venture capital industry, Infectious Greed blogger Paul Kedrosky says.

- Gluskin Sheff chief economist David Rosenberg succinctly lists what’s plaguing the economy. “Greece. Portugal. Ireland. China tightening. Bank bashing. Foreclosures. The housing and mortgage market. Jobs. The Fed’s exit strategy (if it happens),” he says. What does it all mean? “There is no quick fix,” the Pragmatic Capitalist says.

- Bernanke’s confirmation vote suddenly looks like it’s in jeopardy. Not a good sign, especially since it would have some “unpredictable macroeconomic consequences all on its own,” Matt Yglesias writes.

- Betting on Bernanke not such a sure thing anymore. As more senators come out against reconfirming Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman, the betting markets are starting to sour on him, Catherine Rampell writes at NYT’s Economix blog. Odds of Bernanke being reconfirmed have fallen from 93% to 80%, according to Intrade

- The Economics of Contempt blog wonders if Obama’s plan is merely a “transparent political stunt”?

- People love to criticize. But Reuters blogger Felix Salmon says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the future impact of Obama’s bank plan. “No, it won’t singlehandedly prevent another financial crisis – but I’m getting a bit tired, at this point, of people criticizing necessary moves on the grounds that they’re not sufficient,” he says.

- “Fear and greed are the odd couple whose constant squabbling dictates the direction of financial markets,” Liam Denning writes in a WSJ Heard on the Street column. Keep an eye on the VIX.

- The Last of Lost – ABC’s hit series set for its final season. How awesome is this show? Obama actually rescheduled his “State of the Union” address a few weeks ago so it wouldn’t conflict with the season premiere.