tables chairs nicosia cyprus
Flickr / jurek d.
Nicosia, Cyprus
It was a quiet end to the week.
First the scoreboard:
Dow: 14,512, +90.5 pts, +0.6 percent

S&P 500: 1,556, +11.0 pts, +0.7 percent

NASDAQ: 3,245, +22.4 pts, +0.7 percent
And now the top stories:
  • Cyprus continues to be the center of attention.  Leaders are scrambling to structure a deal to bail out the country's banks.  At this point, it appears these talks will continue into the weekend.

  • Like many, Goldman Sachs' Jim O'Neill notes how small Cyprus is.  "I am fond of saying that China (at least in 2011) was creating the equivalent of another Greece every 121⁄2 weeks," he wrote today.  "China creates another Cyprus every week. If Cypriot banks reopen next Monday, in the time they have been shut, China has created another Cypriot economy."

  • Societe Generale credit strategist Suki Mann has been impressed by the market's calm reactions to all of this uncertainty coming from Cyprus.  "Fantastic," wrote Mann in a note. "The market reaction to the crisis in Cyprus. There is no other way to describe it. Peripheral government debt is holding firm, equity indices have zoomed past the moon, safe-haven bonds have rallied (just in case) and corporate credit walks on by, merrily." 

  • Mann says that this can be explained by the Fed's Ben Bernanke and his central bank peers around the world.  "There's been massive manipulation of the markets, it's given risk asset performance a huge boost for the best part of nearly two years, and we are sure there's more to go."