Market Talk

- The Apple/Adobe war over Flash jumps to a new level: Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs uncharacteristically pens a post weighing in on his decision not to support Flash.

- Adobe’s (ADBE) CEO responds.

- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) acquiring Palm prompts Digital Daily blogger John Paczkowski to ask: “Why spend $1.2 billion on a company whose downward spiral has been the talk of Silicon Valley for the past year?” The answer is relatively simple — H-P wants its own operating system, which is exactly what Palm has to offer.

- What does the Fed’s “extended period” really mean? NYT’s Economix and Calculated Risk weigh in.

- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) is taking a page out of Apple’s playbook: It wants an operating system it completely controls without relying on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows. Unfortunately, Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider isn’t optimistic about the plan.

- Greece fizzles…But the Dow sizzles.

- “The uptrend remains in place, and until it is broken we maintain an upside bias,” Barry Ritholtz says. “We are not at the sorts of extremes yet that make the contrarian in us scream ‘sell.’”

- Why do markets pay any attention to ratings agencies?

- Initial jobless claims dropped 11,000 to 448,000 last week. “If you’ve been following the soap opera with this data series you know that we’ll need to see something more dramatic before the central bank changes its monetary tune of standing pat,” James Picerno writes at The Capital Spectator.

- Paul Kedrosky looks at stocks vs flows relating to consumer solvency.

Looks like a quiet Friday on Wall Street in September, and who would’ve imagined that back in August? But the fearful landmine of a month has been has been more like a pastoral field, with the Dow up 3% so far in September and the S&P 500 up 4.4%.

Stock futures up a bit this morning, but with empty calendars, investors will probably just phone it in today. Still, it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out for that correction, should it ever actually show up.

And with the SEC proposing to ban so-called flash trading, both Bats Exchange and Nasdaq already banning the practice, and we wonder if that will manifest itself in a ratcheting down of volatility, or volume, or both, or neither even.

And we wonder if there’ll be any reaction to that Journal story about the Fed looking to reign in banking-executives compensation. Can’t imagine Vikram, Jamie, Lloyd and the rest of the boys are too happy about that. Although, call us cynical, but we have no doubt the boys will find a way around whatever laws eventually get written.

S&P futures up 2.20, DJ futures up 18. Ten-year down, yield at 3.39%.