Despite largely positive corporate earnings reports, investor caution has set upon Wall Street. For the third straight day stocks are set to move into negative territory, with futures showing the three major U.S. indexes heading lower ahead of Thursday's opening bell.

Some blamed Wednesday's near 1% drops in the Dow Jones industrial average and the S&P 500 on a late-day sell-off driven by the latest Beige Book survey from the Federal Reserve that showed the economy is ever so slowly emerging from recession -- too slowly, it would seem, for investors.

Stocks are poised to head lower as investors continue to digest news out Tuesday about the nation's flagging housing market. While in recent months optimism had crept into builder stocks in anticipation of recovery, a report from the Commerce Department showed new-home construction flat last month.

The news sent the three major U.S. stock indexes lower in trading yesterday, and futures this morning show the Nasdaq Composite Index and the S&P 500 each lower by a half percent, along with the Dow Jones industrial average, which could be trading back under the 10,000 level.

KaChing! KaChing!

It only makes sense to call a company a sound you like to hear. This is exactly what CEO and co-founder Andy Rachleff must have had in mind. His new company -- kaChing, of course -- is backed by Marc Andreesen (a name often associated with that sound) and Jeff Jordan, the CEO of OpenTable (NASDAQ: OPEN), two guys who usually do a solid job of backing winners. But, they've taken on a challenge by backing a company in the financial services industry.

There is too much noise on Wall Street, and it becomes clearer with each passing day why some of the best money managers and investors in the world choose to do their business from somewhere else.

The most famous of all being 'my pal' Warren Buffett who has operated his business from the amazing "financial Mecca" of Omaha, Nebraska.

Today I wake up to the news that the market is down because oil is down because the world economy may not be healing as fast as many had hoped.

Wednesday, Bernard Madoff requested leniency through his attorney Ira Sorkin, who suggested a sentence of 12 years would be a sufficient penalty for his client's crime of stealing billions of dollars in one of the greatest frauds in history.

Sentencing by U.S. District Judge Denny Chin is set for Monday June 29, and the eyes of the world will be upon him. So will the eyes of the yet-to-be discovered fraudsters everywhere.

My thoughts on the subject are relatively simple and have little to do with revenge or payback. In cases like this I often remember a very old quote from another time and place.

Investors are expecting Wall Street to continue its recent winning ways.

Stocks are poised to open higher as investors await March retail sales data and the weekly unemployment report. Markets in Europe and Asia were higher.

Retail sales, though weak, may not be as bad as investors had feared. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Wal-Mart Stores and a select group of its discounting peers have helped retail sales exceed modest expectations every month since December, and that streak likely will continue."

I am not often at a loss for words, but when I found out that New York is going to spend our tax dollars to retrain investment bankers for some kind of useful work, I was speechless. In total, New York will spend $45 million in government money to retrain investment bankers, traders and others who have lost jobs on Wall Street, as well as provide seed capital and office space for new businesses those laid-off bankers might create.

This raises so many questions: Why does an unemployed investment banker need any taxpayer money? Don't retired investment bankers already have tens of millions of dollars stored up? What kind of work could an investment banker be trained to do that someone would pay for? And if so, that other job would pay so much less than investment banking why would a former investment banker would take the job?

Even though Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner could have made a better impression on Wall Street, the over-reaction to the plan he outlined seems excessive.

In just hours after the announcement, the major indices backed away from the key 20- and 50-day moving average lines and plunged to the bottom of the current trading range. For the S&P 500, the support is at 800 to 820 -- and the index closed just seven points above the top line while the Dow actually penetrated its support line.

It is hoped that Geithner's professorial lecture resulted from inexperience in explaining real issues to the public following an increase of presidential expectations. If that's the situation, then we should see more details and see them quickly.

Remember Wall Street analysts? Those are the people who go on tout TV and tell you to buy stocks regardless of what is happening to stock prices. The reason you should ignore them is that they get paid to make you buy stocks which generates commissions for their employer. If they issue 'sell' recommendations, they will scare people away from the market. And then there won't be any commissions to pay them.

This comes to mind courtesy of some fresh statistics on analysts' rate of issuing buy recommendations as stocks have plummeted in the last year. When stocks hit their peak in 2007, analysts put buy or hold calls on stocks 95% of the time. And last month, history's worst January, analysts urged you to sell a mere 5.9% of stocks. In 2008, as the market lost almost 40%, sells never outweighed buys or holds.

ClusterStock has put together a countdown of the biggest financial losers of 2008.

The results aren't too surprising: Executives at big banks with large stock holdings lost huge chunks of their fortunes. Former Citigroup (NYSE: C) head Sandy Weill saw his net worth plunge from $1.8 billion to $1.3 billion, and former Lehman head Richard Fuld lost about $1 billion.

But before you feel too bad, it's important to remember that these guys were playing with the house's money. As CEOs, they received huge stock and option grants as part of their compensation -- it's not like they ever paid cash for any of their shares, with the exception of the occasional token insider buying. No matter how you look at it, these guys were paid enormous amounts of money while destroying other people's wealth.

Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Ted Poe sent a letter to new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week asking that he demand that Citigroup (NYSE: C) withdraw from its 20-year, $400 million contract for the naming rights to the New York Mets stadium.

"At Citigroup, 50,000 people will lose their jobs. Yet in the boardroom of Citigroup, spending $400 million to put a name on stadium seems like a good idea," said Kucinich. "The Treasury Department, which forced Citigroup corporate executives to give up their private jet, should also demand that Citigroup cancel its $400 million advertisement at the Mets field and instead begin to repay their debt to the taxpayers."

If a $400 million naming rights contract from a company that's on government welfare doesn't seem ludicrous to you, it should. The notion that the $20 million per year will generate enough earnings for the company to offset the cost is a pretty silly one.

But maybe there's a compromise: Since all of us provided cash to Citigroup, maybe it should be given a name that's a tribute to grotesque mismanagement at the company: "Citigroup's Arrogance Arena" perhaps? Or how about "Failed Bank Field." The possibilities are endless, and definitely something that should be put in an online poll with one vote per taxpayer. If we're going to bail out the banks and still let them buy naming rights to baseball fields, we should at least have some fun with it.

One of the questions that I spent this week discussing is this: What was Wall Street thinking? Whether it's using taxpayer money to pay itself $18.4 billion in bonuses or to buy a $50 million corporate jet after posting $35 billion in losses, people are wondering whether Wall Street gets it. The answer is yes. Wall Street gets that nobody stopped it from paying bonuses when it took our money, so it took what it could. Unless we limit how Wall Street spends taxpayer money, it will keep paying itself big bonuses.

Wall Street is a place where the people at the top are trained to grab as much as they can out of the hands of the other graspers. At least $200 billion worth of TARP money went to Wall Street with no strings attached. If you put that much money into the hands of a culture that believes firmly in taking what it can get -- it usually pays half of its revenues to employees -- you end up with Wall Street taking as much as it can from the taxpayers.

Just like the government's tardy recognition of the recession, nine months after the fact, Washington has become embarrassed over and over again by the scandalous behavior of Wall Street investment banks and corporate executives. This includes: overindulgent life styles at company, shareholder, and taxpayer expense; outrageous bonuses by money losing companies; corporate jets; lavish business retreats; gaming of stock options and more.

Our nation has been strip-mined by corporate executives that think short term, focus on themselves instead of their company, and people they represent, and have been negligent to consider the repercussions of their actions or inaction.

Strip-mining allows for the removal of minerals in the fastest and easiest way possible grabbing at surface material as you work your way down and cause havoc to the ecosystem. Environmental problems are of great concern now more than ever and the process is heavily regulated -- more so than the economic strip mining of the last few years.

Since Washington is so affected by lobbyists whose interests are not aligned with the overall public well-being (note: I did not say welfare), as the cynic would say "the best government money can buy", the public is not getting its monies worth.

Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) may cut 5% of its workforce. Given the drop-off in investment banking activity and asset management, the number may not be high enough, but it is a start. Wall Street is still worried about the bank's future, as its stock price shows. Shares change hands at $21, down more than 50% during that last year. Morgan is doing better than some other companies in its sector, but the deepening recession could hurt earnings more than last year.

According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription requited), "The New York firm, which let go of about 7,000 employees last year, may decide on another round of staffing cuts in the next two weeks."