Stock Market Update: Tuesday August 25, 2009

So, it looks like Ben Bernanke (Motto: Holy crap did I get lucky the economy didn't tank any worse because of the stuff I did!) gets to stick around for a while. President Obama took a break from golf / reading / vacationing to announce that he has asked Bernanke to stay on as Fed chair. As a demonstration of his confidence, Obama did not require Bernanke to wear a tie to the event.

There was another nice article focusing on our fine institution on Motley Fool today.

"Top-Rated Stocks Blowing the Doors Off This Market" is an article from Motley Fool's CAPS community - which is kind of a "crowdsourcing" approach using the Motley Fool community to "identify the best stocks." In other words, a bunch of amateurs pretending to know what they're talking about. Which is exactly what analysts do, except they get paid for it. In any event, take it all with a grain of salt but there are two quotes from the article that jumped out at me:

"Of the more than 2,000 CAPS members rating US Bancorp, some 93% expect it to outperform the broader indices. For a bank, that's about as good as it gets these days."

"Throwing the baby out with the bath water could describe what happened to [US Bancorp]. They are a well managed organization that has not gone down the same high risk path as many of the other banks, however they were painted with the same broad brush as all the others."

None of the above had much impact on the market today, which is still stunned by Plaxico Burress saying (again) that "he didn't realize he'd accidentally shot himself until he saw the blood dripping onto his sneaker."

Stock Price

(Opinions expressed in the Stock Market Update certainly do not represent the views of U.S. Bancorp and sometimes not even Peter Milliron. Read at your own risk. Or not, as the case may be.)