One of the primary economic gauges is about to indicate contraction, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate a double-dip is on the horizon, says Deutsche Bank economist Joe LaVorgna.

The normally big-time bull LaVorgna offered an unusually bearish assessment of the state of manufacturing — but tinged it with a bullish flavor.

Welcome to the world of economic doublespeak.

In the latest iteration, LaVorgna predicts that the Institute for Supply Management’s headline number is likely to drop below 50 in “the next couple of months.” That number is the dividing line between expansion and contraction, and last month’s better-than-expected ISM reading helped set the stage for September’s otherwise-bizarre stocks rally.

Tomorrow Credit Agricole's Mike Mayo will finally meet with the management of Citigroup to focus on the question: what's Citigroup's plan for the future.

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit is expected to attend the meeting along with, CFO John Gerspach.

In advance of the meeting, Mayo published a note titled, “Capex way down and aided expenses." The report outlines some of what he hopes to discuss in a meeting with Citigroup management.

Besides the usual concerns — financial targets, accounting and corporate governance — Mayo has honed in on capital expenditures.

Moody’s cuts Spain from AAA (CNBC.com)

The billionaires are feeling bullish.

Several billionaires among us have taken publicly announced aggressive bullish outlooks. There’s David Tepper, of course, who proposed that stocks are in for a “win-win” scenario : going up if the economy recovers or, if the recovery doesn’t come about, going up when the Fed intervenes with a second round of quantitative easing.

But perhaps no billionaire—or even many of us regular folks—has sounded as bullish a bellow as John Paulson.

Speaking to a standing room only crowd at the University Club in midtown Manhattan, Paulson reportedly said : “If you don't own a home, buy one. If you own one home, buy another one, and if you own two homes buy a third and lend your relatives the money to buy a home."

Paulson’s claim to fame is to have engaged in “the greatest trade ever”—massively shorting the housing market. (Incidentally, we think Tepper’s trade of going massively long the US bailout of financial institutions may have immediately supplanted Paulson’s trade for that particular superlative.) Thanks to that trade he’s now one of the E. F. Hutton’s of the market: when Paulson speaks, people listen.

We’re listening. So what is it that Paulson’s telling us?

Lehman tchotchke hits the block: (New York Times) ready cash and questionable taste are all that’s required to own a small piece of Wall Street history

I generally regard company disclosures of SEC investigations as MERELY a headline. Investigations, it appears, have become a commodity with little to show in the end. The good news is that there’s an inquiry; the bad — rarely do they find anything or does any company get severely penalized.

TheGreen Mountain investigation may go that same route, but it’s interesting on another level: According to the company, the SEC is focusing on revenue recognition practices with a fulfillment vendor.

The company snuck out the disclosure in an 8-K filing without a formal press release.

An economic tsunami warning is being sounded but are bank investors listening?

Jim Rickards, Senior Managing Director of Market Intelligence, and Chris Whalen, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Institutional Risk Analytics tell me the sputtering real estate industry is brewing a cocktail of economic disaster and bank investors need to be on high alert.

Lawmakers may have unintentionally opened the bond-market up to high frequency traders by passing controversial derivatives-clearing requirements as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

The Blanche Lincoln-sponsored clearing-house requirements will force certain derivatives, including many credit default swaps \(CDS\) on corporate bonds, to be cleared by centralized clearing houses and traded on swaps exchanges. The hope is that this will make the market in derivatives more transparent and reduce counter-party risk.

Very little attention has been paid to the likely unintended consequences of this move. Let's begin with a simple observation: government intervention into established market processes always produces unknown and unintended consequences.

Shares of Green Mountain Coffee, which makes those K-Cup coffee pods, have taken a hit after the company’s disclosure yesterday that it overstated revenue last quarter related to an inter-company markup in its inventory balance.

It also said that it had received an inquiry from the SEC into certain revenue recognition practices and its relationship with a fulfillment vendor.

The company snuck out the disclosure in an 8-K filing with the SEC without a formal press release. In its disclosure, Green Mountain claimed the revenue overstatement was an “error” and “immaterial.”

However, as immaterial as it may appear, the “error” added 3 cents to earnings per share of the company, which beat estimates by a penny.

Some (options) guys (or girls) have all the luck.

Well, at least one of them has had a tremendous amount of good fortune lately by playing long and short positions against each other on drug store chain Walgreen and pocketing nearly half a million dollars in profit.

This particular trader’s good fortune began back on Sept. 20 when he or she sold 35,000 put options at the October $27 strike price for an average premium of 17 cents apiece on a day when the stock closed at $29.24, according to information from Interactive Brokers.