Though it's already a few weeks into winter, Wall Street bears may be finally ready to hibernate, though no doubt against their will.

A powerful rally in which virtually all fears have been bypassed has pushed stock marketdetractors to the brink, ready to wave the proverbial white flag as the only direction for the market seems to be up, up, up.

"They're almost ready to throw in the towel," Scott Bauer, of Trading Advantage, told CNBC. "I don't want to say 'capitulation,' (but) guys down here really are saying, 'All right, I can't fight it anymore, let's go.'"

Someone has placed a job placement notice on a controversial online classified ads site seeking "beautiful, sophisticated ladies" to seduce businessmen in hopes of "extracting key pieces of information."

Julia La Roche of Business Insider says that the ad was sent to her by a trader who noticed it on BackPage.com, a website that has been accused of aiding sex trafficking of underage girls and prostitution. Goldman Sachs was once an indirect investor in Backpage.com, which was a subsidiary of Village Voice Media—in which Goldman held a 16 percent stake.

The advertisement claims to be placed by "a group that specializes in extracting" information from executives "by seducing them with beautiful ladies."

The legality of this is questionable. But the case against this as a form of insider trading is not as airtight as you might expect.

Today's "Power Lunch" segment!

A California man has started a company offering a special identity card for people who write a lot of online reviews.

The idea is that a prolific online reviewer would present the card to, say, a waiter as a way of letting the restaurant know that he plans on writing a review on Yelp or a similar service. This way the reviewer will be able to "get the service you deserve," according to the founder of ReviewerCard, Brad Newman.

The summer of 2007 was a time of intense stress in the financial markets.

Credit-rating agencies had begun to mark down large amounts of asset-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations linked to subprime mortgages. Quant funds spent about a week in meltdown mode. The subprime market was being roped off as a toxic wasteland. But the problems that began in subprime had spread to Alt A and parts of the prime mortgage market. Stocks were shaky. Certain companies — Countrywide and Bear Stearns, especially — we being talked about almost in the past-tense. Corporate credit was "infected," with high-yield bond and loan spreads moving way out.

It was in this atmosphere that Jim Cramer gave his famous "they know nothing" speech. The transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve released Friday show that Cramer was absolutely right. (Please see Note 1 below.)

One of the things that the transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee meetings reveal is that there are moments of real levity inside the board room of the central bank. Quite often these are marked in the transcript by the appearance of the word "[Laughter.]"

My personal favorite from the just released 2007 transcripts is the following exchange, in which Cathy Minehan of the Boston Fed debates with Philadelpha Fed head Charles Plosser about the fashion choices of Vincent Reinhart, economist and secretary for the FOMC.

From the March 2007 transcript:

So what was on the mind of central bankers as the U.S. housing bubble popped and the financial crisis began to unfold in 2007?

The Federal Reserve Friday released the transcripts of its main policy committee meetings from 2007, following a policy it adopted recently of releasing these materials with a five-year delay.

Next year we'll get the 2008 minutes,which will show the discussions and debates of the Federal Open Market Committee at the height of the crisis.

If you've been busy this week doing, well, anything, you've probably missed the fantastically wonkish, dorky debate about the future of monetary policy, fiscal policy and the declining distinction between them carried on by Steven Randy Waldman of Interfluidity and Paul Krugman of the New York Times.

The biggest financial companies in America had a tough quarter of trading at the end of 2012. Whether it was stocks or bonds, trading revenues declined or stayed flat at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, each of which reported earnings this week. Meanwhile these banks seemed to have pulled away from the bond market while getting stung in the stock market.

Let's start in fixed income. The business of trading bonds, currencies and interest rates trailed off for most everyone in the last quarter. The end of year was just a tougher time to make money trading as a trader and market maker in these areas.

One of the most striking things about Goldman Sachs earnings reports is that the firm pretends it doesn't trade at all. Yet it derives about half of its income from things that many people would consider trading.

For years now, Goldman has banished the word trading from its lexicon. You won't find the word in its earnings reports. Officially, the firm just doesn't having trading units at all. Instead they have "market markers" who are supposedly focused on facilitating customer business. And other folks who make "principal transactions," which means making longer term investments with Goldman's money.