Steve Jobs' Illness No Longer a Mystery

The Wall Street Journal pulls no punches, slapping news that Apple founder Steve Jobs underwent a liver transplant at the top of the front page (no banner). The question of Jobs' health has long troubled investors, journalists, and Apple (AAPL) fans the world over. No longer: "The chief executive has been recovering well and is expected to return to work on schedule later this month, though he may work part-time initially," the paper reports. In Jobs' stead while he is working part-time, Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, may take "a more encompassing role." Cook is also likely to be appointed to Apple's board in the "not-too-distant future." Jobs has been on medical leave since January, though he never divulged what was ailing him. The move has since drawn ire from investors whose thinking is that Jobs' health is central to the health of the overall company. To watch video commentary from Fortune on how Jobs' health affects the company, click here. "In this case, it is unclear whether the surgery is material because Mr. Jobs was already on leave," the Journal says. The transplant took place about two months ago in Tennessee and is one application we're hoping works with his operating system. Ba-da-ba.

In other top news, R. Allen Standford, the "once high-flying Texas billionaire with a Caribbean knighthood and a penchant for publicity and cricket," as Reuters describes him, has been indicted on fraud, conspiracy, and obstruction charges. The "brash 59-year-old mustachioed financier"—again, a Reuters gem—surrendered to the FBI yesterday, "four months after regulators accused him and three of his companies of a ‘massive ongoing fraud.' " Specifically, the Securities and Exchange Commission claims that Stanford "fraudulently sold $8 billion in high-yield certificates of deposit," or in layman's terms, operated a giant Ponzi scheme, defrauding some 30,000 investors. The New York Times reports that in addition, Stanford paid out up to $100,000 to Antigua's "top banking regulator," Leroy King, to keep the SEC at bay—literally. King, now a former Antiguan official, was also indicted.

In a story that has become commonplace, Bloomberg describes how Lincoln National Corp. (LNC), a Philadelphia-based insurer, flew insurance agents and company executives to the Grand Wailea resort on Maui—at $369 per night—the week before accepting almost $1 billion in TARP money. It also hosted a pair of conferences attended by more than 100 salespeople, the last one ending the night before the firm accepted the bailout funds. The story comes a day after a WSJ article on the use of company jets for private use by the executives of the biggest banks. That story, however, elicited a negative reaction from readers, who said "enough with the wealth envy" already! As for Lincoln, a spokesomwan for the insurer said the trip was part of an incentive program, which is not an unusual practice, according to Bloomberg.

Also on the platter today, Reuters explores what will become of Goldman Sachs' (GS) relationship with Warren Buffett. As you'll recall, after Lehman Bros. failed last year and before the government unveiled its massive plan to bailout banks, Buffett stepped up and handed over $5 billion to Goldman in exchange for preferred shares and warrants to buy common stock. Now that the bank has returned taxpayers' $10 billion in loans, investors are left wondering: What can be expected from Buffett? Well, not much, is the anticlimactic conclusion. "He has a history of making fairly large investments in these kinds of companies and sitting back and letting the management team run the company," Vahan Janjigian, author of the book Even Buffett Isn't Perfect, told the site. "Janjigian expects Buffett to sit tight as Berkshire collects $500 million of annual dividends on the preferred shares and earns paper profits on accompanying warrants to buy $5 billion of common stock at $115 per share for up to five years," Reuters writes. Pulling out its calculator, the site says that Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) "would earn more than $1 billion in profits if it cashed the common stock warrants now. That is in addition to the 10 percent preferred stock dividend, which is twice the 5 percent rate the government was getting from the TARP investment."

Finally, CNNMoney Editor-At-Large Paul R. La Monica ponders whether the recession in fact ended this spring. Gathering insight from a number of experts, La Monica crafts an answer that, in the end, is not much of an answer. Instead, he leaves the debate open, giving views of both sides of the argument. "We're still in a recession. Are we past the worst point of it? 100% yes. But is the downturn over? It's far too premature to make that assessment," said David Rosenberg, chief economist & strategist at Gluskin Sheff + Associates, a wealth-management firm. On the other hand, Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist with Charles Schwab & Co., "believes that the recession ended sometime in the past two months and that the market is doing what is usually does, heading higher before it's common knowledge that the economy is recovering."

Either way, it's a wait-and-see game, La Moncia says. "The National Bureau of Research makes the official call on recessions by looking at various economic trends beyond GDP. And the NBER is notoriously slow in deciding when recessions begin and end. It didn't declare until July 2003 that the 2001 recession ended in November of that year. The NBER also waited until last December to announce that the current recession started in December 2007," he writes. But in the meantime, none of the experts interviewed is advising clients to do anything different. The recession being over does not mean there will be growth or that the pain on Main Street is over.