Beware of April

April has many "surprises" in store, though a few of them have been telegraphed:

• Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley delayed their earnings announcements from mid-March to mid-April - it is currently still possible to find them referenced as earlier in old calendars.
• These delays shortly happened before the Mark to Market relaxing legislation in the US, affecting financial reports delivered after April 2nd. This change will allow banks to decide how much their assets are worth - a ball of string could be declared as worth $2 Billion after this if the bank so chose. The expectation is that the US banks will change their books to produce massive "write-ups" (accounting only profits) on their investments in things now worth not more than said ball of string.
• The "uptick" rule is expected to come out of the April 8th SEC meeting. This is supposed to be some magical rule that will ensure the market doesn't go down, or something, it's not entirely clear what chain of causation would result in an improvement in anything.
• The Federal Reserve is now buying longer term US government debt - $300 Billion happening right now. This is meant to keep interest rates down, which in turn is meant to stimulate the economy.
• There's plans for the Treasury and the FDIC to provide speculators money to buy the toxic assets from the banks. The most likely end result of this is that the banks speculate on their own toxic assets and transfer all future losses to the taxpayer.
  

There's 2 possible causes for this confluence. Either there's something truly awful coming out in April that they're trying to offset, or it's a coordinated attempt to force the stock market higher so the looting can continue just a little longer.