Friday Links: Relief For Hurricane Sandy Should Be Huge Boost To Economy -- $70 Million Per Linear Mile of Coastline from Maine to Maryland

Wells coming off confidential list today have been posted. BEXP has a nice well. OXY reports a well.

RBN Energy: Across the Rio Grande -- the natural gas pipeline boom; US/Mexico

WSJ

Section M (Mansion): did not read

Section D (Arena):

• DVD release of note: Coal Miner's Daughter, 1980, Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn

Section C:

• AmEx to cut 8.5% of staff -- lead story; already posted at the blog earlier
• Wads of cash squeeze bank margins; US bank deposits at end of 2012, at record high -- $10.6 trillion; 5.3% decline in loans outstanding at US banks since 2008; 
• Oil rises on Saudi cutback -- already posted at the blog earlier
• Boeing buyers can't sleep easy -- and still more reports of growing pains on CNBC this a.m.
• By the way, how did Wells Fargo earnings come in? 

The raw numbers show Wells Fargo topped Wall Street’s predictions for earnings and revenue. 

Profit rose to $5.09 billion in the fourth quarter from $4.11 billion last year and on a per share basis hit 91 cents, above the 89 analysts had expected, according to Thomson Reuters.

Revenue rose 6.5% to $21.95 billion, above the $21.3 billion analysts expected.

But investors are concerned about decreasing margins at Wells (see story above).

Section B:

• Apparently US aviation regulators were concerned with the Dreamliner during long transocean flights some time ago
• GM tech center in Atlanta part of bigger push; hiring 1,000 high-tech workers in another right-to-work state; GM moving some operations to Georgia is as a big a story as COP moving some of its workers from its California headquarters to Houston (posted some weeks ago)
• Holiday PC sales fell; soft reception for computers with Windows 8; links easily found if interested

Section A:

• Front page: photo of Mr Karzai; will meet with Mr Obama; Mr Karzai will learn that the drawdown is faster than he had hoped
• Wow! Huge story on page A2 -- long-term unemployed begin to find work
• Mr Sandusky -- remember him? -- wants a new trial
• Op-ed: Sandy Relief should result in gold-plated boardwalks -- the $61 billion "proposal" in relief equates to $69 million per linear mile of coastline from Maryland to Maine; several story lines here, not the least of which is the exaggeration of actual damage caused by the "monster" storms; and note -- from Maine to Maryland -- if one recalls, the most damage in terms of dollars was, well, it did not stretch from M-to-M

New York Times

Yahoo!Finance took me to this story. It's a very nice analysis and explains why re-training the long-term unemployed is non-helpful; something that is fairly intuitive; and why unemployment is unlikely to come down much going forward

Market

In early trading, ENB hits a new high; BRK-B hit a new high on opening, but has pulled back slightly; EOG flirting with new high, but down a bit. KOG is relatively flat and CLR down slightly. Interestingly OAS is up a bit. [Update: EOG did hit a new 52-week high intra-day but settled back below the high. Same with BRK-B. ENB did finish with a new 52-week high.]