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The Treasury, the Fed, and Warren Buffet have been the only buyers in this meltdown and have been largely focused on financial companies. Meanwhile the rest of the market has gone down 30% year to date and very few, if any, stocks have been spared.

What do we look for next? Does the market just keep going down endlessly? What will bring this to an end? Clearly not government intervention. While possibly necessary (we'll see), the splurge has clearly not put an end to selling in the markets.

We need to see more Warren Buffets stepping up. And my bet is they will eventually. And they will be corporations buying back their own stock, large private equity and buyout firms doing going private transactions with all equity cap structures, and possibly foreign companies seeking bargain acquisitions in the US.

What's interesting, as Howard pointed out repeatedly on twitter yesterday, is that corporations have not yet stepped up to stock buybacks.

Microsoft announced last month that they plan to buy back $40bn in stock over the next five years. They have $25bn in cash and short term investments and are currently earning about $20bn per year in operating cash flow. Microsoft's stock is trading at about 11x operating cash flow.  It's market cap is $227bn and institutions own 60% of it, meaning there is about $130bn of $MSFT stock in the hands of institutions. If Microsoft wanted to, at the current price, it could purchase all $130bn of that stock from institutions with its current cash balance plus operating earnings over the next five years. If Microsoft is confident about its business prospects going forward, it should be an aggressive buyer of its own stock at these levels. And maybe it is. It's stock is only down 3% in the past month while the S&P has been down 15%.

What about Google? $GOOG is down almost 50% year to date and the company is valued at $115bn. Institutions own roughly 60% of its stock, roughly $70bn of it. Google is earning about $7bn of operating cash per year and has $13bn of cash and short term investments on hand. So it would take Google longer to buy back all the stock institutions own, more like eight to ten years. But still, that's a lot of purchasing power and the market is asking the same question Howard did yesterday.

The silence of $goog into this meltdown is just as deafening with all their cash.  I am not going to be run over.

In bad bear markets, like we are in, investors look to corporations to defend their stock and Google has not yet shown an interest in doing that. That's something to look for. When you net out Google's cash, it's trading at $100bn, a mere 12x operating cash flow. That's value territory.

Let's look at News Corp. Rupert Murdoch's company, the best managed media company out there, is down 56% in the past year and is now trading at a mere six times operating cash flow. News Corp is also about 60% institutionally owned. So that means Rupert could buy out his external investors with four years of his cash flow. But we have yet to see him do that.

I could go on and on. Apple is worth $67bn after you back out the $20bn of cash they have on hand. It earns over $5bn a year. That's another value stock right there.

And those are some of the best US companies right there. The list goes on and on. Starbucks trades at 7x cash flow, Walmart trades