Riddle me this: When is it good news when an analyst slashes his price target for a stock by 55%? Answer: When that “reduced” target price still represents a 59% gain. That’s precisely the scenario facing Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (ADR: RIO), the world’s biggest iron-ore producer.

With gross domestic product plummeting and the jobless rate at a 14-year high, U.S. policymakers will have to author at least one more stimulus package in the months to come if they are to elbow aside the impact of high unemployment and depressed consumers.

The collapse this weekend of the once venerable investment bank, Lehman Brothers, will cost 26,000 financial-sector workers their jobs.

On top of that, the take-over of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America will mean pink slips for approximately 24,000 of Merrill’s employees.

In the currency market, the dollar sank against the euro. Late Friday, the euro was trading at $1.5622 vs. $1.5503 on Thursday.

American International Group Inc, the world’s biggest insurer, has announced it will replace CEO Martin Sullivan. The news comes after AIG reported record losses due to risky mortgage bets.

Sullivan follows the departure of a wave of Wall Street top execs, including the recent bloodletting at ailing investment bank Lehman Brothers.

“On Wall Street, after Bear Stearns fainted, the other financial firms took smelling salts,” says Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning.

With the market the way it is today, you can’t help but look for an investment, any investment, that might react differently than everything else. These kind of investments are “non-correlated” because they move independently of the overall market. But they can be tricky to locate, and even harder to trust.

Apparently, there’s just no stopping stocks. They just keep on trucking higher as investors forget about the recent troubles in the financial sector and focus on Merrill Lynch’s note that ‘credit markets may be “past their worst”’.

Struggling U.S. financials Citigroup Inc. (C) and Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. (MER) may get another equity injection from state-owned Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA), the fund’s managing director told Reuters.

Apparently, there’s just no stopping stocks. They just keep on trucking higher as investors forget about the recent troubles in the financial sector and focus on Merrill Lynch’s note that ‘credit markets may be “past their worst”’.

Another day, another round of bad news from the brokers and the banks.