With the the likely appointment of Janet Yellen to Vice Chairwoman of the Fed, don’t expect the easy money policy to grind to a halt.  In fact, Janet “easy money” Yellen is more dovish than Kohn and another cog in the easy money wheel.  She supports extremely low rates to keep this economy artificially inflating.  In February, she commented on the economy saying  that while the economic tide appears to have turned and recovery is well under way, “the economy faces a long period of subpar growth, high unemployment and downward inflation pressure, and so it will continue to need “extraordinarily low interest rates.”  Let the good times roll.

The news has certainly helped pressure the dollar in the last couple days, but the dollar remains bullish for now and just consolidating recent gains.

The internet changing news from Cisco (CSCO) the tech world has been anxiously awaiting was unveiled today.  Cisco’s CRS-3 router has been heralded by CEO John Chambers as a system that can download the Library of Congress in a second, stream every movie made in four minutes and allow simultaneous video calls by every single person in China.  It will be available at a cost of $90K in the 3rd quarter of this year.  Mighty impressive, but let’s see what the tech experts have to say.  I thought I’d do a run down of some of the reactions to the big announcement today.

From BNET

BNET doesn’t see any immediate gratification unless others get on board  and says, “Chambers’ promise depends on cable operators and their telecom rivals abandoning greedy habits like doling out bandwidth in metered increments and randomly hiking service rates. So, this could take a while.”

From ChannelWeb

ChannelWeb reports that Cisco’s statement of 12x the capacity is aimed at competitor Juniper which has issued a statement saying the claims are misleading: “The claim of 12 times the traffic capacity of the nearest competing system is based on a theoretical maximum of 72 interconnected CRS-3 chassis in order to achieve the 322Tbps total capacity — this will likely never be deployed in practice due to space, power, and manageability realities.”

From Yankee Group

The Yankee Group notes that the CRS-3 is IPv6 ready, designed to handle the explosion of mobile devices, “cloud ready” and 10x the speed of the closest competitive product but doesn’t quite live up to the big hype.

Quote: “So, did the Cisco CRS-3 live up to the immense hype that preceded it?  No, I don’t think so. But they did set a very high bar.  It’s a good solid announcement that will allow network operators to put a foundation in place to drive differentiated multimedia and mobile services.”

In my opinion, the technology is great and a big step towards handling the explosion of data, but let’s put it in perspective.  As a UBS analyst pointed out today, the high end router market represents less than 5% of Cisco revenues.  The new router may be a game changer for the internet in the years to come, but it’s probably not a game changer for the stock price.

Shares of Cisco were flat today.  Get your CSCO trend analysis here.

The biggest IPO story since Google will continue to leave investors wondering.  While the Facebook IPO will happen, there are still no imminent plans with founder Zuckerberg saying “we’re definitely in no rush”, according to a WSJ article today.  He makes a good point in that the company is in the envious position of not requiring massive capital to build factories or even market the product, so the same motivations for going public quickly aren’t there.  Adding to the delay may be the fact that Zuckerberg, as the WSJ points out, is a micro manager who may be having a tough time relinquishing some control of the company of which he owns 25% of and controls voting power.

However, an IPO will take place as investors and shareholders have been promised and the company has been taking measures to prepare for it.  In 2008, the executive team was expanded highlighted by the hiring of Google exec Sheryl Sandberg and adding Netscape founder Marc Andreessen to the board.  Of course, the rumors, speculation and predictions are flying and many think the company will go public next year with a market cap of nearly $40 billion based on the current revenue number and applying a multiple similar to that of Google.  The company apparently was cash flow positive last year and believes revenue could reach $2 billion this year.

In the meantime, Zuckerberg found a way to ease the growing impatience of its employees for a big pay day ahead of an IPO.  Last year, $100 million in shares were sold to Russian firm Digital Sky Technology which also invested another $200 million giving them a 3.5% stake in the company without increasing the shareholder base.  Just an appetizer of what will likely be a rain of cash for Facebook employees.