With a disputed election in Iran and a coup in Honduras, Jon Stewart wants to know: Where is the CIA?

He finds his answer in a Reuters Video segment by Fred Katayama, who reported earlier this month that the spy agency is recruiting Wall Street’s finest.

You can view our original segment here:

This is turning out to be an earnings season when all bets are off on how technology giants will perform. With tech earnings taking the market on a roller-coaster ride, it wouldn’t be surprising if investors are a little sick in the stomach already. 

The hits and misses so far among the biggest and brightest:

Intel: Missed expectations, profit fell 90 percent and they said they wouldn’t give a detailed quarterly forecast due to the economic uncertainty.

IBM: Beat expectations and gave an outlook above Wall Street estimates. Not only did IBM shares surge on the news, it even lifted major U.S. indexes.

Apple: Record quarterly earnings made Wall Street delirious. Can’t blame investors for feeling relief after all the worry about CEO Steve Jobs.

Microsoft: Didn’t want to hold on to the bad news until the appointed time, so the it reported earlier than expected on Thursday. Said revenue and profit would almost certainly drop over the next quarter or two. 

Google: Saved the day, kind of, by balancing Microsoft’s disappointing results with news of a quarterly profit that topped Wall Street expectations.

Google gave Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali some hope that the tech sector continues to be more resilient than other sectors. “Although it depends on the severity of the recession,” Squali wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “Nobody is immune forever.”

Squali carried this ominous tone into his Friday morning research note as well, calling this earnings season a “mixed bag” and the 2009 outlook “unanimously poor.”

With Yahoo and Amazon set to report earnings next week and no guarantee what surprises might be in store there, we wonder if investors will just call in sick until next year’s earnings.

(Photo: Reuters)

Hours after it issued its second warning in three weeks, forecast shrinking cell phone sales for 2009 and promised to reduce expenses, Nokia held an investor meeting in Brooklyn, New York. Most analyst meetings take place in Manhattan, and Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson told the audience on Thursday that he’d been asked why the company chose the Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge.  Brooklynites are very accommodating, Simonson said — adding that Nokia saved money by moving the meeting from the heaving center that never sleeps.  Simonson didn’t give a figure, but JPMorgan said in a note that Nokia saved as much as $500,000 by simply making Wall Streeters cross to the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge.  It’s hardly enough to counter a 5 percent cut in cell phone sales volume next year and probably not even a fraction of the cost of putting Nokia’s latest multi-media phone, the N-97 on the market, but it is a good start. Maybe other conference organizations will take its cue, and this reporter will have a shorter commute more often.

(Photo:Reuters)

If you want to know the latest developments in the shredding of Bear Stearns, you turn to breaking news sites. If you want to know the wider cultural implications of what’s happening on Wall Street, check the Urban Dictionary.

One of the most recent entries, less than a week after Bear’s problems were reported in the press, is “Bear Stearned .”

Definition:

to crash, to collapse, to plummit, to fail

1. I can’t believe it, I completely bear stearned that test.

2. For the third time this week, my computer bear stearned on me.

I plan to use this term at least 50 times this weekend.