Dow rallies 300 points ahead of Obamamania, Can the President Elect orchestrate a miraculous market Turnaround? Part one of your “chicken long” ideas and plenty more…

When the president of the United States visited this region almost a year ago, the city of Dubai closed down for the entire day. Locals and expats alike jokingly refer to this event of yore as “Bush Day,” a day when they stayed home from work and watched movies as the leader of the “free world” took a Big Bus tour of the city.

Let’s start at $500 billion. Why? That was the figure Paulson’s emergency elixir was thought to cost…as recently as Friday. In a characteristically misguided effort to restore calm to the markets, the federal government proposed a plan that involved purchasing a half trillion dollars of carcinogenic mortgage-backed assets.

Congratulations! If you are an American taxpayer, you now own a share of the risk held by two firms that own or guarantee around half the mortgages in the country, says Joel Bowman. And this at a time when home prices are plummeting, inventories are swelling, foreclosures have reached an all time record and unemployment skipped along to a five-year high of 6.1%, further weighing on demand for new digs.

Financial charts can generally look good or bad. But sometimes, one comes along that is downright ugly. The Rude Awakening’s Joel Bowman says the earnings chart for the Dow Jones Industrial Average index (.DJI) is particularly sore on the eyes. Earnings were negative in Q208, for the first time ever, giving the index a price-to-earnings ratio of nil. Such losses will heighten deflationary fears, encouraging the government to crank up its inflationary policy. More from Joel…

The Rude Awakening’s Joel Bowman says the real estate bubble in his new home of Dubai is unsustainable. Unimaginable oil riches are being spent at unimaginable speeds, sending house and rental prices through the roof. But if the lesson from the U.S. has taught us anything, it is that property speculators aren’t going to win forever.

In a field of dead financial institutions, the opportunities are plenty for the hungry value investors. They key, of course, is identifying which provide a tasty meal and which are rotten to the core. It’s a matter of separating the EZ pickin’s from the E. coli.

Even if Dubai does manage to keep the lights on and the taps running, the city must also contend with the very clear and present danger of tightening supply chains for raw construction materials.