At its annual shareholder meeting yesterday (Wednesday), Swiss bank UBS AG (UBS) announced it would cut expenses, raise additional capital and replaced its chairman.

After a week like the one we just had, “black seems white;” “up seems down,” “conservative seems liberal” and “bearish seems bullish.”

The U.S. markets leaped into the second quarter with the strongest start since 1938, as a rally in financial stocks led all three major indices to post gains of more than 3% on the first trading day in April.

Although the stock market rocketed higher on Tuesday, that doesn’t disguise what was a very poor first quarter.

Bad news from the banks, so why are shares soaring? Why Central London house prices aren’t immune to the crunch.

In the Great Depression one in four were out of work, today it’s only one in twenty. Whoa! What happened yesterday…

The short sellers appear to be dwindling. This morning the Financial Times reports that global stock markets continued to rally.

The rally comes despite heavy writedowns from Swiss banking giant UBS.

The uncertainty about the markets’ direction reflected the fact that stocks rose after another round of bank writedowns and capital-raisings – developments that might have been expected to send prices lower.

When recession comes earnings fall and those slippery PE numbers can start making fools out of us. The trick to smart investing, as Mark Slater once commented, was finding those companies where earnings were going up so fast that at some point the company would be re-rated by the market thereby boosting the share price.