Currencies have strong rally!  Trade Deficit jumps 16.3% in July!  HR 1207 Gets a hearing!  Gold gets back to $1,000! And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

Good day… And a Happy Friday to one and all! Today is Patriot Day in the U.S. and a day that brings back memories of cowardly attacks on our country 8 years ago. I remember the shock and horror on everyone’s faces, and that image will remain with me to the grave. I also remember trying to write the Pfennig the “day after”… It just didn’t seem that important of a thing to do, but a reader told me that to keep things as “normal” as possible was the best thing I could do… So… I wrote…

OK… The currencies, and this time I mean the majority of them not just euro and yen, added to their gains this week VS the dollar yesterday… The Big Dog, euro, is once again

Another currency rally….  Bank of Canada cuts 75 BPS!…  A Santa rally?… What Asia thinks… And Now… Today’s Pfennig! OK… Another day of “healing” for the currencies, as the 1.29 handle was achieved and held on to in the overnight markets. Slowly… Like sand through the hourglass, these are the days of currency healing! HA! That show, Days of our Lives, was burned into my brain as a kid, as it was my mother’s fave soap.

The single unit was higher within the 1.29 handle overnight than it is right now, as it has given back a bit of ground on the news that a European Union Commissioner, Buti, said that, “economic indicators point

Another currency rally….  Bank of Canada cuts 75 BPS!…  A Santa rally?… What Asia thinks… And Now… Today’s Pfennig! OK… Another day of “healing” for the currencies, as the 1.29 handle was achieved and held on to in the overnight markets. Slowly… Like sand through the hourglass, these are the days of currency healing! HA! That show, Days of our Lives, was burned into my brain as a kid, as it was my mother’s fave soap.

The single unit was higher within the 1.29 handle overnight than it is right now, as it has given back a bit of ground on the news that a European Union Commissioner, Buti, said that, “economic indicators point

Coordinated rate cuts...  Did the Fed reignite soaring inflation?  More pain in Iceland...  Revisiting the 90's in Japan... And Now... Today's Pfennig!

No wonder the human icon in the Sparc logo is jumping for joy.

He (or could it be a very svelte she…) has probably just trousered $100,000 plus a year for being employed by the government-run Sparc (Sport and Recreation New Zealand) to help 84 other people give away $74 million of taxpayer and Lotto money to a bunch of clubs, sportspeople and other good athletic causes.

I stumbled across this not so-little-gem of government mis-spending in a John Key speech about National’s policy on sport. Frankly, I couldn’t believe what he’d said. It was simply too outrageous. Key said 47 of Sparc’s 86 staff were paid more than $100,000 a year and that Sparc spent $35 million on activities in its Wellington office, including spending $5.5 million this year on its website.

Surely this was wrong, I thought. So I looked at that very expensive Sparc website