Front and center this morning, we had the entire day-and-a-half rally in the risk assets completely erased, wiped out, and reversed yesterday… Recall that I told you in the morning that the euro (EUR) had lost about 1/4-cent while I was writing… Well, it held to near 1.37 until about mid morning, and then the trap door was sprung, and the euro went falling through the 1.37, and 1.36 floors!
[Read more...]US Trade Deficit Widens
January 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The price of oil has dropped from $83.18 a week ago, to $79.80 this morning… Why did this spoil my day? Well, like Lloyd Bridges in Airplane, I must have picked a bad day to fill my gas tank – the other day, when oil was so high!
Well… Even with oil backing off, the Canadian dollar/loonie (CAD), remains well bid this morning… That’s strange… But, in the whole scheme of things, not too strange… I mean, not Tiny Tim strange… Just strange enough to make someone think for a moment about what else could be underpinning the loonie? It sure wasn’t their return to a deficit, which, by the way, was only $0.3 billion in November, which reversed October’s $0.5 billion surplus… I’m talking about trade balances here.
[Read more...]US Trade Deficit Widens
January 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The price of oil has dropped from $83.18 a week ago, to $79.80 this morning… Why did this spoil my day? Well, like Lloyd Bridges in Airplane, I must have picked a bad day to fill my gas tank – the other day, when oil was so high!
Well… Even with oil backing off, the Canadian dollar/loonie (CAD), remains well bid this morning… That’s strange… But, in the whole scheme of things, not too strange… I mean, not Tiny Tim strange… Just strange enough to make someone think for a moment about what else could be underpinning the loonie? It sure wasn’t their return to a deficit, which, by the way, was only $0.3 billion in November, which reversed October’s $0.5 billion surplus… I’m talking about trade balances here.
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Poorly Defending Government Spending
The Dow rose about 40 points yesterday. Gold fell a few bucks. The dollar spent the day treading water. Nothing much to report there…
But what’s this? It appears that a $787 billion stimulus package ain’t what it used to be, at least according to the Congressional Budget Office. The government’s spending watchdog (yes, such a thing exists) estimates that, all in, President Obama’s stimulus package will end up costing $862 billion, a $75 billion blowout. How did this accounting error come to pass, readers want to know? In painfully predictable fashion, the feds drastically underestimated the cost of unemployment compensation.
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