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Survived the hurricane but the power, infrastructure did not. Ike hit us near midnight head on. Never saw the eye; we got the western eye wall all the way up with no respite for almost 6 hours. An awesome display of nature but the damage was equally awesome. Back to the market, report will resume Monday along with alerts though report is abbreviated as the team is scattered & some do not have full access to data. A busy weekend outside of the storm (when you are in the storm you have no idea what is going on unless you have a generator, etc.; the whole world knows more about what happened than you do). BAC spending $44B to buy MER. LEH is preparing bankruptcy papers after BAC quits its talks (for obvious reasons). Banks agree to create a $70B fund to ensure liquidity. AIG seeks $40B Fed bridge loan. Asian markets dropped on the LEH bankruptcy story but we will see if they rebound on the BAC bait and switch play though the world markets remain under a lot of pressure in the wake of the LEH news and many commentatos talkig of 'disaster' for US financial industry. In any event we will see how the recent leaders in consumer oriented sectors move after a modest retrenching late in the week. Despite the financial worries they have steadily improved. We apologize for the issues this weekend; we got a head fake when it looked as if the net access, etc. was up only to go down and not recover.
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