*** The Big Picture: Analysts Exist to Make Economists Look Respectable ***
*** The Big Picture: Go Swedish, part 47 ***
*** FT Alphaville: Presenting … the French proposal in full ***
*** FT Alphaville: What’s wrong with markets in seven easy slides ***
*** FT Alphaville: Sino-Forest as Russian love story ***
*** Business Insider: In A New Poll Of Stock Forecasters, You Literally Can’t Find One Single Bear ***
*** Bronte Capital: Sino Forest: some ancient history ***
*** Bronte Capital: The Paulson Sino Forest loss ***
*** Common Dreams: What Happened to Media Coverage of Fukushima? ***
*** Star Simpson’s Blog: I Spent A Coin (And I Liked It) — How I Bought Lunch in Manhattan with Bitcoins ***
*** Cassandra Does Tokyo: Limey Beans ***

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Conference Board consumer confidence came out at 58.5 vs. 61.0 consensus and 61.7 reading for May (revised from 60.8).

Weakening…

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Seasonly adjusted S&P/Case-Shiller HPI 10 city was unchanged in April; On year level 10 city index is down 3.1%.

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