Jack the Pipper

Usually, when everyone in the market is talking and thinking about something you tend not to get it. The Heisenberg principle of markets?

A friend called late yesterday to ask me what I thought about the “stress test.” I told him it seemed to be working, I was pretty stressed out by the market thanks to the carnival act we call the Treasury and Fed.

“It’s all about the stress tests,” exclaimed a Bloomberg news reporter this morning.

She’s got that right. So far the unofficially released results are “reassuring,” and the currencies (with exception of the US dollar, of course) mostly love it.

John Ross and I were discussing what a “$35 billion funding gap”, as its being report, really meant for Bank of America; JR said, “Heck, that’s like the cost of a McDonald’s cheese burger to our government these days.”

Juggling is a rather simple skill. But it’s impressive nonetheless. Perhaps the appeal is in its inherent uncertainty – the number of juggled items exceeding the number of hands doing the juggling.

We got a nasty European Commission downgrade of growth per key news above; plus this morning from Wolfgang Münchau, writing in the Financial Times:

Zoom-zoom if the fundamentals of falling trade surplus, deflation, and rising unemployment become the drives.

One of the news headlines above notes the optimism that can be taken from yesterday’s worse-than-expected headline report on US Q1 GDP. Enough said, but I’ll keep going anyway …

BLT sandwich lovers everywhere are rejoicing; those lock-limit down in bellies have likely lost their appetites; but it seems, on day three of the swine flu, stock and currency traders have definitely regained theirs.

This is one of those times when we’d like a straight answer; we’re likely not going to get one, though …