Market News

Financial headlines are taking the opportunity of tying the risk-averse move this morning to North Korea. We’re told those friendly folks test fired some missiles — I think the term ‘nuclear’ was used too. Of course, any activity of this sort tends to remind markets of the instability there.

Is Mr. Geithner speaking today? He is becoming such a joy for dollar bears, as John Ross mentioned in his closing to CC yesterday. And the dollar doom and gloom crowd is smelling blood in the water; rightly so!

Chock it up to the instantaneous transmission of information; that’s the reason for such near-term, news-driven price action. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you want up-to-the-second news and prices, chances are you’re going to be able to find it somewhere very easily.

From the dollar Libor to housing, signs are that the financial meltdown is beginning to thaw. The efforts put in by the US Fed in lowering interest rates, followed by quantitative easing, seem to have finally led to the money markets easing off.

I commented to a very smart and savvy friend via email yesterday: “Late move against the dollar today.” His response: “Investors need/want risk.” It is the type of response Luke Skywalker would have likely received from Yoda, in Star Wars.

The second ‘Key News’ headline I included above is the type of news item I consider in formulating a fundamental view of the economy and markets.

On Friday, German reported some very nasty economic news–their economy fell at a 16% annualized rate during the first quarter of 2009.

Maybe we are just sticklers for detail. And maybe it’s simply rear-view mirror stuff we are worried about. But we keep having trouble with the use of the term “optimism” when two of the world’s biggest exporters–China and Germany–aren’t doing what they do best–export. 

Retail sales fell 0.4% in April after their 1.3% dip in March, dashing hopes of any foreseeable economic recovery. This sent the stock markets plunging, led by a fall in retail stocks causing investors to turn risk averse again and run to the safety of the dollar.

Let me quick say that stocks and the US dollar have turned this week. Sure, I may have been a few days early in expecting the move; but in watching the reaction to the news so far this week, risk-appetite has a few extra days (at least) to go hungry.

One of our main premises which our long-term dollar bull market called is based was on the core belief US dollar-based credit would not again flood the global to any degree we saw during the last dollar bear cycle (2001-2008)

Jack noted it yesterday: the consensus anticipated a sell-off in stocks. I certainly didn’t disagree with all the headlines – indeed, over the last two weeks I’ve been harping on the potential (read: need) for stocks to sell off.

The US dollar early this week seemed to be on a slippery wicket, when it depreciated against major currencies. The currency depreciated as some improvement in the economic status was projected in terms of US pending home sales and a marginal increase in construction spending.

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.