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| CNBC After the Federal Reserve's aggressive moves this week to ease the credit crunch, Wall Street is starting to wonder if the worst is finally over. Well-known banking analyst Richard Bove even delivered a report on the financial sector Thursday with the bold heading, "The Financial Crisis Is Over." Bove, of |Punk Ziegel, admitted in the note that such a proclamation "sounds ridiculous," but he genuinely believes the crisis is over. "There will be more negative developments, but they will be meaningless," Bove wrote. Later, in an interview on CNBC, Bove said: "I'm convinced that all the signs that you would want to see that would tell you that this thing is over are there. And this is over." Bove said last weekend's rescue of Bear Stearns was the watershed event that heralded the end. "This event sent so much fear through the market that action was taken," Bove wrote,calling the Fed's actions, "innovative, dramatic, and ... brilliant." Still, not everyone is convinced. "I admire a courageous call by Dick Bove," Art Cashin, director of floor operations for UBS Financial Services, told CNBC, but "I’m not sure we’re totally out of the woods." "The focus is going to shift from the brokers and the bankers to the hedge funds now, Cashin said. "And that’s so opaque that the rumor mongers are going to have a field day." That sentiment was echoed later by Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald, who told CNBC that he agrees that the crisis will now ripple into hedge funds and we'll see another Carlyle-like collapse. "This is a bottoming process," Bob Doll, CIO of Blackrock Global told CNBC. "I don't think anybody rings the bell, but it's a process and you have to start thinking more construcitvely about parts of the financial structure." Bove, for one, thinks this is a "once in a lifetime opportunity to buy bank stocks." And, at least one portfolio manager agrees. "This is the time to be building positions" in the financial sector, Jeff Krumpelman, senior portfolio manager at Fifth Third Asset Management, told CNBC. Though, he clarified that they're looking at banks and diversified financials such as J.P. Morgan. He also recommend Lehman Brothers. "Lehman is an example, I think, that folks were fearful of going into the week," Krumpelman said. "But that's an example of a name that I think I would own."| Financial stocks rallied Thursday, with Bear Stearns (NYSE:BSC - News), JP Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM - News) and Lehman Brothers (NYSE:LEH - News) all up more than 4 percent.
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