In times of crisis, leaders often look for an enemy to distract the great unwashed from the growing problems. The President of the US has decided that it should be the Legislature. Bernanke, it seems, has been lobbying senators to keep his job. The great contradiction yesterday was Geithner saying he had nothing to do with the AIG decision, and a later witness (I forget the name) saying that he signed off on all the AIG transactions.
In the meantime, it’s official: The FED has declared that we are in a recovery. It must be. Ford was profitable in accounting-world. More importantly, this means that lquidity backstops and MBS purchases shoud be on the way out. In my [...]
Michael Davey again with a quick comment elixir…
Sorry for the no-post this afternoon – I was out the door soon after the close and now back late. FYI, I believe Mole is back at his post here tomorrow. So for the moment – put your pencils down!
I missed tonight’s party in DC and have no idea re the take-away. Looking at the futures (up a decent clip, though nothing too dramatic) I’ll presume nothing terribly new was directed against the Financials, Wall Street, Etc.
I’m not all that interested anyway. These things don’t tend to be terrific market shakers and O has shaken the markets already; what is the upside for him to [...]
The IMF recently raised their global growth forecast. Remember the good old days? The USA, with 5% of the global population, made up 25% of the global GDP. Like locusts, they consumed somwhere around 15% of global production, and as a result of declining manufacturing and export – were almost 50% of the global current account deficit (not NET, but take all the negative balances and the USA was half). Imagine the amount of capital flows that went into the USA to fund the twin deficits – that they used to chide other countries about via the World Bank and IMF. And China is supposed to replace this with their empty cities and under-utilized factories?
Welcome to the [...]
Michael Davey here…
All notions of when, where and how much the market may bounce aside (since I don’t like to think about such things fresh into a correction anyway), let’s share a quick, comment-cleaning glance at a couple of names which just cannot seem to get off their backs.
In a group that cannot seem to rally of late.
[click on these to get a decent view]