Market Talk

- More than 80% of companies that reported earnings have topped analysts’ estimates. But don’t get too giddy. “After all, ‘better than expected’ could simply reflect the low level of the underlying estimates and the strength of the actual data,” Pragmatic Capitalism says.

- Is fresh, massive stimulus via QE2 really necessary? The Reformed Broker blogger Josh Brown isn’t so sure. He notes companies continue to report decent earnings. And more disturbing is the fact that “outside of home prices, inflation is becoming more and more of a reality…The propping up of the dead and the dying via federal spending and zero percent rates is not warranted with markets and prices rebounding elsewhere.”

- On the other hand, the risks of not engaging in QE2 are too great, James Picerno writes at The Capital Spectator. “Calling on the Fed to stand pat risks repeating the mistakes of monetary history,” he says. “We have to deal with the pressing threats as they arrive, and worrying about runaway inflation today is
premature, and perhaps more than a little dangerous. The day for fighting that battle will come. But not now.”

- Credit Suisse notes much of the earnings season move for equities might be over, despite the fact that there’s plenty of reports still to come. “Our Portfolio Strategy team finds the bulk of the impact of earnings on market performance seems to occur in the first two weeks of earnings season, which ends today,” firm says, according to MarketBeat.

- As the reviews pour in regarding Windows Phone 7 devices, so far so good for Microsoft (MSFT). NYT’s Bits blog posts a roundup of reviews. The new lineup of phones are getting “overwhelmingly positive reactions,” blog says. “It’s still unclear if this will translate into sales or make it possible to attract customers away from existing platforms.”

- Hulu’s considering slashing price of Hulu Plus — its subscription service still in beta mode — to $4.95 per month from $9.95, MediaMemo blogger Peter Kafka reports, citing sources.

- Latest iPad rival hits the market. H-P releases its $800 touchscreen tablet computer.

- FCC weighs in on the Cablevision/News Corp dispute over Fox.

- Deal Journal’s Shira Ovide looks at the best and worst deal Apple ever made.

- WSJ profiles the state of Jay-Z’s empire, the rap monger who’s worth an estimated $450 million.

- 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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- S&P 500′s back in positive territory for 2010. “Small and midcap stocks have led the way up in recent days, which is a positive sign for bulls hoping that the market is about to make that next leg higher,” Bespoke says.

- Defining victim losses in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme as difference between cash paid into a Madoff account and amount withdrawn before fraud collapsed is the “difficult but correct call,” Barry Ritholtz writes.

- Forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers updates its projection of this week’s jobs report, concluding “somewhere between 150,000 and 220,000 jobs were temporarily lost in February due to unseasonably bad weather.”

- Still, take any snow-related monthly employment projections with large grain of salt. “February’s will include weather related job losses, March will see a rebound and, assuming no freak spring snowstorms, April will show the underlying trend,” WSJ’s Real Time Economics says.

- Policymakers are congratulating themselves for avoiding total collapse, when they should be berating themselves for failing to engineer recovery,” Paul Krugman notes.

- Consumer-protection unit within the Fed a “dreadful idea,” Yves Smith writes. “Do we have a single shred of evidence to support the notion that the Fed has undergone a miraculous conversion experience as a result of the crisis and will now act as staunch defender of the little guy? I certainly haven’t seen it.”

- Believers of the recovery focus on consumer spending slowly returning to pre-recession levels, but how consumers will sustain such spending seems questionable given the plunge in income, credit and savings, Peter Schiff says.

- Time to stop fighting speculation, Reuters blogger James Saft argues. “Fighting reality by punishing people who point it out — and yes, may profit in the process — is a lot easier than addressing the fundamental underlying issues.”

- This week’s spat between Disney (DIS) and Cablevision (CVC) has a familiar feeling, MediaMemo blogger Peter Kafka says. “The characters change, but the script is always the same. A programmer wants more money from a cable provider, and threatens to pull its shows.”

- Google’s (GOOG) latest acquisition of online photo editing service Picnik, announced yesterday, represents another head-to-head battle of competing businesses with Adobe’s (ADBE) Photoshop and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhoto.

- “Twitter’s finally pushing ahead with a business plan that could begin to justify the venture capital investment it’s attracted,” John Paczkowski says.