Key News

• Oil rose to hit a six-month high above $63 a barrel on Wednesday after OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia said the global economy had strengthened enough to cope with oil at $75-$80 a barrel. (Reuters)

Key Reports (WSJ):
7:00 a.m. May 22 Mortgage Application Refinance Index: Previous: +4.5%.
7:45 a.m. ICSC Chain Store Sales Index For May 23: Previous: -1.2%.
8:55 p.m. Redbook Retail Sales Index For May 23: Previous: -0.2%.
10:00 a.m. Apr Existing Home Sales: Expected: +1.8%. Previous: -3.0%.
4:30 p.m. May 22 API Oil Industry Report

Quotable

“Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.”

                              David Hume

FX Trading - Beauty in markets usually depends on your book...
Global healing a lat the credit market…it’s a beautiful thing…

Source: Northern Trust

Global healing al la the stock market…it’s a beautiful thing…

Global healing al la a new 2009 high in oil prices…it’s a beautiful thing…

…it’s just that pesky news over the past couple of days about the continued deterioration in global fundamentals  that nags at us, and makes us wonder if beauty isn’t just skin deep…

• German exports and company spending plunged in the first quarter, dragging Europe’s largest economy into its deepest slump on record.
• South Africa’s gross domestic product contracted in the first quarter, pushing Africa’s biggest economy into recession for the first time in 17 years as manufacturers and miners scaled back output and fired workers.
• Thailand’s economy shrank more than expected in the first quarter, contracting the most in a decade as the nation slid into a recession.

• Japan’s export slump moderated in April, helping the country post an unexpected trade surplus and adding to signs the worst recession since World War II is easing.  Shipments abroad fell 39.1 percent from a year earlier, after dropping 45.5 percent in March and a record 49.4 percent in February, the Finance Ministry said today in Tokyo.
• The world economy hasn’t bottomed out yet, adding to “great uncertainties” about where commodity prices are heading, China’s central bank said. The “external economy has yet to bottom out or establish a trend towards a recovery,” the People’s Bank of China said in regional reports posted on its Web site today. “The global financial crisis is still spreading and the impact on China is deepening.”

Hmmm….the “impact on China is deepening.”  That’s a very interesting revelation flowing from China indeed.  And more interesting given the fact that recent beauty in markets burst directly from optimism that China’s stimulus is working so well that China alone will have the ability to lift all from this global morass.  Wishing it were true doesn’t make it so.  But then again, that is the stuff that makes markets.