By Pat Bagley.

Canada's banks are performing pretty well.

The World Economic Forum says Canada’s banks are the soundest because they speculated less on mortgage assets that have proved toxic. Canada’s banks, which account for about 6.7 percent of the industry’s worldwide market value, suffered only 1.5 percent of the $817 billion in mortgage-related losses reported globally.

The thesis from which I have been operating - though it has been getting harder the past few days - is that we are at or near the bottom of a wide trading range.

However, though we may be bottoming - a belief of which I am having increasing doubts - I do not believe that a new bull market is imminent, for the following reason.

From ShanghaiDaily.

From The Financial Times

Almost half of all the complex credit products ever built out of slices of other securitised bonds have now defaulted, according to analysts, and the proportion rises to more than two-thirds among deals created at the peak of the cycle.

Since the government is giving money to just about anyone with a pulse - as long as they screwed up really badly - we here at Running of the Bulls would like to expedite the process of distributing trillions of dollars to the unworthy.

If you are a CEO of an American auto company, or the clueless head of a giant American financial institution who never took financial history at your Ivy League school, Running of the Bulls is happy to offer you this easy application so you can patch up that black hole on the balance sheet you incompetently destroyed.

Three months ago, I highlighted four stocks trading below net cash.  Since that time, two of those companies have been subject to buyout offers, the second coming today as the British company, CSR, offered to buy SiRF Technologies.  Let us see how each has performed since, starting with SiRF.

From Tony Crescenzi yesterday at RealMoney

A long time ago, we noted the sale of Equity Office Properties to Blackstone from Sam Zell.  Blackstone had the savvy to flip many of the buildings to the slathering hordes eager to believe that commercial real estate would continue to rise at ridiculously high rates of growth.  Of course, such

From The New York Times

But it has never seen a 10-year stretch as bad as the one that ended last month.