An anonymous reader writes “The BBC are reporting on a grisly trade lying behind the booming business for replacement body parts in medical procedures. Many unscrupulous “dealers” will procure body parts from anyone willing to deal them — e.g., undertakers, medics — and will process them for resale onto legitimate companies. Apparently a fully processed cadaver can fetch up to $250,000. Now, who states I’m worth more alive than dead?”

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Filed under: Products and services, Google (GOOG), AT and T (T), Economic data

When the Federal Communications Commission releases the results from its $19 billion auction of new wireless spectrum, all eyes will looking for one name: Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG).

The search giant is eager to expand into the mobile world. Odds are that the company won’t outbid Verizon Wireless or AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) for the “C” block of new spectrum that attracted a $4.74 billion bid. BusinessWeek has reported that Google probably withdrew from the bidding. But as The New York Times notes, Google scored a pretty significant victory already.

“While Google was not expected to post a winning bid, it has already reached an important victory by influencing the auction rules,” the paper stated. “The commission forced the major telephone companies to open their wireless networks to a broader array of telephone equipment and World wide web applications.”

In other words, people can download whatever application they want to their mobile phones, which is exactly what Google wants to happen. Fortune recently noted that open standards are a central feature of Google’s Android mobile platform. Speculation abounds about Google’s interest in the mobile area, though the much anticipated Gphone has yet to materialize.

quot;We see Android as an important part of our strategy of furthering Google’s goal of providing access to information to users wherever they’re,” Google Director of Mobile Platforms Andy Rubin recently wrote on the official company blog. “We recognize that many among the multitude of mobile users around the world do not and may never have an Android-based phone. Our goals must be independent of device or even platform.”

Shares of Google, like many other stocks, have gotten hammered this year because of concerns about a slowing economy. For Google to rebound from its 36% decline, the company will need to convince investors that great things are on the horizon. Google’s mobile strategy might help push the stock back to the levels many investors believe it is worth.

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Filed under: Major movement, Earnings reports, Apple Inc (AAPL), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Intel (INTC), Market matters, Citigroup Inc. (C), Advanced Micro Dev (AMD), Federal Natl Mtge (FNM), U.S. Steel (X), Nucor Corp (NUE), Commodities, Housing, Federal Reserve, Cramer on BloggingStocks, Recession

TheStreet.com’s Jim Cramer says after massive runs, bears present five points. The good news is that three of them have gotten a little better.

After massive runs, you immediately hear the following:

1. Earnings are going to be terrible.
2. Commodity prices are out of control.
3. Housing prices are still falling.
4. Credit is a real problem and mortgages are hard to come by and at higher prices.
5. Someone else — a bank, a credit firm, a monoline — is about to fail.

Then we go down again. And we get frightened.

I don’t have anything to counter the first one. I particularly think that tech earnings are going to be bad, like those out of Sony Ericsson. I think the only large winners in tech will be those who go up against large losers, and the wins won’t be that great anyway: Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) (Cramer’s Take) over AMD (NYSE: AMD) (Cramer’s Take), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) (Cramer’s Take) over everybody, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) (Cramer’s Take) over everybody. The safe place is real-economy “Rest of World”ers like CSX (NYSE: CSX) (Cramer’s Take) and U.S. Steel (NYSE: X) (Cramer’s Take) and Nucor (NYSE: NUE) (Cramer’s Take), or the drug stocks with huge overseas exposure.

Commodity prices? What can I say, oil’s going to $125, where hopefully people will drill enough to find more, or we will switch to the much more abundant natural gas, which is why I like that group so much. The other commodity pressures are political. That’s ethanol. Maybe a new regime will realize that, but this one’s so awful about ethanol I can’t bear it.

But three, four and five are changing a tad, which means that the rate of rate of change of the declines in housing and brokerage may be slowing. Or in non-calculus: Things aren’t getting as bad as fast as they were.

In six more months the bulk of the resets of the heinous 2-and-28 mortgages — encouraged if not pushed by Greenspan and Bernanke — will have run their course. The maximum bulge of horrible resets starts right now, the second through fourth quarters of 2006, the housing peak. It’s the worst part. But then it is over.

That matters. Because these resets are either causing people not to spend or they’re causing people to abandon their homes. Both add to a recession, and the latter brings down the housing prices around the home, causing deflation.

In the last 48 hours though, we have seen a 75-basis-point cut in short rates, a deal reached where Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) (Cramer’s Take) can start lending and buying its own bonds back, and a dramatic decline in housing starts, again. Fewer homes, more abundant credit, at lower rates: That’s how you attack the crisis head-on, and it is being done. I can’t accentuate enough how important it is to get Fannie Mae to help lower rates as its mortgage paper is what’s trading so crazily and keeping rates high. When you think that the facility that allows banks to swap bad bonds for cash for 28 days, you can see that the non-Treasury side of the ledger just got a lot superior.

If you couple those positives with the idea that when, not if, banks fail we just call up a more massive, better bank and tell them they don’t have to pay up for the equity and the Fed will practically guarantee the transaction’s profits, we know that the systemic risk is now taken off the table for all but a collapse of Citigroup (NYSE: C) (Cramer’s Take), which is, unfortunately, still too huge to fail.

All of these problems are going to linger. All of these problems haven’t vanished. But all of them didn’t get worse lately, in fact they got a tiny superior.

RELATED LINKS:

• Crude Oil Futures Climb in New York
• False Cries of a Tech Catastrophe

Jim Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for TheStreet.com’s sites and serves as an adviser to the company’s CEO. At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in the stocks mentioned.

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mernil sends in an article from the NYTimes that casts a glance at a study done in the Czech Republic (natch) on what divides the successful scientists from the duffers. “Ever since there have been scientists, there have been those who are wildly successful, publishing one well-received paper after another, and those who are not. And since almost the same time, there have been scholars arguing over what makes the difference. What’s it that turns one scientist into more of a Darwin and another into more of a dud? After years of argument over the roles of factors like genius, sex, and dumb luck, a new study shows that something entirely unexpected and considerably sudsier might be at play in determining the success or failure of scientists — beer.”

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Filed under: Major movement, Products and services, Consumer experience, Bank of America (BAC), Economic data, DJIA, Federal Reserve

The Fed cut its Fed Funds rate 75 basis points to 2.25%. If you invest in stocks, you might be feeling a bit of relief at the 420 point rise in the Dow this day. But if you have a balance on your credit card, don’t hold your breath waiting for that rate to fall. Meanwhile, you may sleep more fitfully tonight as the rate cuts weaken the dollar and raise your cost of living.

Business will immediately benefit from the rate cut. That’s because banks, such as Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) stated it lowered its prime lending rate to 5.25% from 6%, minutes after the Federal Reserve cut the federal funds rate by 75 basis points and other banks are expected to follow. But this is the rate that a bank lends to its prime business customers.

Some credit cards have gone down, but some cards have barely budged. For example, Chase Freedom actually increased its rate from 14.24% in September to 15.99% and Discover’s Open Road credit card is at 10.99% today, just as it was before the rate cuts in September. Even if the Fed cuts rates, credit cards don’t have to pass that reduced rate onto consumers.

If you’ve a variable rate mortgage that resets later this month, you are in luck. However, if you have a fixed rate mortgage and seek to refinance or you try to get a new mortgage, I would not be too optimistic about getting a steal. That’s because banks are still very capital constrained and will only lend to the most creditworthy borrowers.

Furthermore those lower rate is nearly certainly going to be like a tax on the middle class. That’s because It will cause inflation to rise. It will also cause the dollar to decline which raises the price of oil - thus driving up the price of gasoline almost immediately and squeezing the middle class.

The lower interest rates and bank bailouts are not the right answer - they’re boosting inflation without solving the real problem which is for banks to take write offs of bad assets and raise capital as I discussed here.

Update: A commenter below raised an excellent point about the effect of the rate cut on seniors. Anyone who lives on a fixed income whose capital is invested in bank deposits or CDs will be receiving an even lower rate on those investments. With rising gasoline and food prices and lower interest income, seniors will be squeezed harder by the Fed rate cut.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.

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Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising

A month from now, on April 19, “hundreds of independent record stores across the country will celebrate Record Store Day.” In addition to the stores, numerous artists will lend their support to the day and some will appear or offer special gifts to lucky fans and attendees. This support indicates what place the CD has even in a shrinking market and where the record industry fits into that market. If artists can still support a dying format and the stores that rely on that product, hopefully fans, listeners, and consumers can find something in it, too.

A kink in the plans of artists like Paul McCartney and Stephen Malkmus to support the day is that while they can appreciate record stores based on experiences in their youths or support the stores by buying hundreds of dollars worth of CDs, young people today might not be as familiar with the entity or have the money to purchase that many CDs. This is especially true in the economy right now, but even more pronounced when one thinks about the ease and availability that digital stores have introduced to accessing and enjoying music and other media from the comfort of one’s own home.

The record industry is certainly invested in the day as well, since it is the CDs they produce that facilitate record stores. But the easy fact that they have sat on their hands for so long means that the day comes at a time with the CD is no longer a truly viable format for selling music. Again, look at the digital stores that are finally offering the same quality files that are on CDs. I’m not knowledgeable in bit rates, but I do know that 256 kbps is on the same par with the quality of a CD. To support “Record Store Day”, all the industry has to do is market the CD in new and inventive ways, but I couldn’t speculate how that can possibly be reached.

Designating a day and inaugurating an annual “Record Store” event is a nice idea, but if it is to be truly successful, consumers are going to need to be more invested in record stores beyond one day where “goodies” are given away and artists make appearances. Every day consumers need to consider going to a record store to get music as a viable substitute to downloading music directly into their hands.

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