“I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.” — Warren Buffett

1. Eurozone risks double-dip recession looms as euro economy contracts — Eurozone GDP fell a quarterly 0.2% in Q2, which was in line with forecasts but was down from unchanged in Q1. Germany’s GDP growth slowed to 0.3% from 0.5%, with the meager growth helped by exports and private and public consumption.
2. Housing Building Permits Rebound — below is the chart depictings a rebound in housing.
3. Second quarter earnings beat rate slow — chart courtesy of the Bespoke Investment Group showing percent of companies beating revenue estimates from 2000 to present.

4. Peregrine CEO Russell Wasendorf Indicted on 31 Counts — per Bloomberg, Russell R. Wasendorf Sr., chief executive officer of the collapsed commodity firm Peregrine Financial Group Inc., was indicted by a federal grand jury on 31 counts of making false statements to regulators. Wasendorf, who allegedly stole as much as $215M from customers over a 20-year period, was arrested in early July after attempting suicide and is facing up to 155 years in prison and a $7.8M fine.
5. Government proposes restricted drilling for Alaska — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposed opening 12M acres of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve for oil and natural-gas drilling but restricting production on the remaining 11M acres due to conservation reasons. The area for drilling is thought to contain 550M barrels of economically recoverable oil and 8.7T cubic feet of natural gas.
6. Buffett’s Berkshire exits Intel, buys more banks — based on the latest disclosure, Berkshire sold 7.7M Intel (INTC) shares just nine months after buying into the chipmaker. Berkshire also significantly reduced its holdings in Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Kraft (KFT) and Procter & Gamble (PG), while buying into Phillips 66 (PSX) and National Oilwell Varco (NOV).
7. China Bad Loans Rise for Third Quarter as Economy Slows — per Bloomberg, Non-performing loans rose by 18.2 billion yuan ($2.86 billion) in the three months ended June 30 to 456.4 billion yuan, the China Banking Regulatory Commission reported. Bad loans increased for a third straight quarter, the longest streak of deterioration in eight years.
8. China’s Premier Wen Jia Bao indicates that more easing in the near future — Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has struck an upbeat note about the economy, saying that while downward pressure is “relatively large,” there have been “some positive changes” recently, especially in July.
9. Spain’s bank bad loans hit record high in June — according to Reuters, Spanish banks’ bad loans rose to a record high in June as assets tied to the country’s deflating property market soured further. In the same month that Spain sought a European bailout of up to 100 billion euros for its struggling lenders, their non-performing loans rose to 9.42 percent of outstanding portfolios from 8.95 percent in May.

The week ahead — Economic data from Econoday.com: