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

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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

...

Remember how rosy things looked yesterday morning, with the market shaking off bad economic news?nbsp; Well, that faded in the afternoon, and today, just rotten economic news is giving the markt its lumps. And yet gold is down despitenbsp;an apparent weakening trendnbsp;in the U.S. dollar. Look at a chart of the dollar ...brbrbrimg style=WIDTH: 490px alt= src=http://local.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/7e88b461-578b-47f3-88ec-038e212ad053/aa0ff38d-9bb9-44a5-bba5-8be30d8f6977/dollar.png _height=75 _width=75Maybe the dollar will be able to go higher, but it doesn't look good. So why is gold weaker? I talkeed to a Chicago broker about this late yesterday. He says too many speculators have been burned, and gold buyers are on strike until they get lower prices.brbrMeanwhile, the outlook for the U.S. consumer is awful. Here is a chart for Red-Hot Commodity ETFs subscribers ...brimg style=WIDTH: 490px alt= src=http://local.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/7e88b461-578b-47f3-88ec-038e212ad053/aa0ff38d-9bb9-44a5-bba5-8be30d8f6977/scc.png _height=75 _width=75This is a good area for a bounce in the SCC, and the fundamentals for consumers continue to be dismal.brbrSTRONGHere is ...

Remember how rosy things looked yesterday morning, with the market shaking off bad economic news?nbsp; Well, that faded in the afternoon, and today, just rotten economic news is giving the markt its lumps. And yet gold is down despitenbsp;an apparent weakening trendnbsp;in the U.S. dollar. Look at a chart of the dollar ...brbrbrimg style=WIDTH: 490px alt= src=http://local.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/7e88b461-578b-47f3-88ec-038e212ad053/aa0ff38d-9bb9-44a5-bba5-8be30d8f6977/dollar.png _height=75 _width=75Maybe the dollar will be able to go higher, but it doesn't look good. So why is gold weaker? I talkeed to a Chicago broker about this late yesterday. He says too many speculators have been burned, and gold buyers are on strike until they get lower prices.brbrMeanwhile, the outlook for the U.S. consumer is awful. Here is a chart for Red-Hot Commodity ETFs subscribers ...brimg style=WIDTH: 490px alt= src=http://local.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/7e88b461-578b-47f3-88ec-038e212ad053/aa0ff38d-9bb9-44a5-bba5-8be30d8f6977/scc.png _height=75 _width=75This is a good area for a bounce in the SCC, and the fundamentals for consumers continue to be dismal.brbrSTRONGHere is ...

For all the talk we do around here about our unsustainable Empire of Debt, certain events are still startling. Not surprising, but startling.

Take, for instance, the sentence that greeted me when I opened my morning e-mail briefing from the Financial Times:

China urged the United States to spare no effort to stabilise its economy and financial markets to help avert a global recession

I mean, really: For an older Gen-X’er who came of age during Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” whose twentysomething salad days were the era of the “sole superpower,” this is jarring stuff indeed, no matter how much awareness I had on an intellectual level that it was all hokum. Seriously, the headlines I’ve been accustomed to seeing my whole adult life have been about the United States “urging” other countries to “spare no effort” to do such-and-such.

And then you bore into the meat of the story

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November 24, 2008 What’s so good about putting up $7.4 trillion of taxpayer money to backstop stupid banks? Then it’s said Obama wants a $700 billion stimulus plan immediately. These amounts are beyond mind-numbing. But you know something; I’m no different than you--ticked off. I wonder how much Citigroup stock Sandy Weill and Robert Rubin have sold over the past few years. Whatever misbegotten gains they’ve received should be turned over to taxpayers. But doing so would involve the Treasury recycling it back to Citigroup. Silly me! Okay, all this isn’t my job. Let’s move to the markets where investors were overjoyed by the prospects of more bailouts that should lead to future inflation. Always remember when deflation presents itself politicians and policy makers will choose inflation over tough love every time. Today’s bullish action is follow-through from ...

Not much. The world keeps turning. And the world economy keeps falling apart. Here in Australia, shares of port and rail outfit Asciano (AIO) fell off the table after a Citigroup analyst changed his valuation of the company and moved it from “buy” to “sell.” Asciano is down 93% from its all time high and was down nearly 60% yesterday before going into a trading halt.

Asciano has $4 billion debt on the books (much of it inherited from when the company was spun from Toll in 2007). But yesterday the company assured investors it wouldn’t be beefing up the equity on the balance sheet with another dilutive capital raising. And chairman Tim Poole told investors earnings were in line with forecasts.

The trouble is that with all that debt and, shall we say, challenging business conditions, investors aren’t convinced the equity in the company is worth anything anymore. This

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If the new president looked a little, well, burdened on election night, chances are he’s aging a couple of years in the six-hour span between the release of unemployment figures this morning and his first news conference as president-elect this afternoon.

 

6.5% unemployment in October — worst since early Clintontime.  Worse still were the revisions of the August and September numbers.  And as Karl Denninger noticed, the number of unemployed plus the number of people working part-time who’d like to work full-time now tops 11%.  (And who knows what the real figure would turn out to be once John Williams applies Carter-era standards to the numbers.)

As I write, the president-elect is meeting with his “Transition Economic Advisory Board,” his temporary brain trust as it were.  The names on the panel are, well, interesting.  Some of the faces from I.O.U.S.A. are there.  But one has to wonder if

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Huge trend reversal: Dollar busts, commodities boom… why, and will it last? Rate cuts round the world… U.S. and China slash, Japan considers. U.S. three months away from “official” recession. Two new bailouts: Who’s lining up for help, plus Uncle Sam’s October tab. Denning and Nelson on beating inflation with the right long-haul stock.

The U.S. dollar fell by its largest percentage in 13 years yesterday.

Et voila, the trend we believe is your friend returned with some impressive steam:

The Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index popped 5.9% — diddly squat compared with equity moves lately, but still the biggest daily gain for the index since its inception, in 1956.

Alas, despite the rise, the CRB is still down 24%

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It may seem odd but the quote of the day is from Robert DeNiro in the movie Casino. It follows with my long-term thinking regarding how Wall Street has been organized and operated since the 1990s: a casino architecture where it’s easy for investors to find their way in but impossible to find the exit while Da Boyz rip ‘em off. This being a political year there will be plenty of finger-pointing going on. But, this financial crisis has been the result of a great bipartisan effort. It began with the bipartisan destruction of the Glass-Steagall Act which was enacted after the Great Depression prohibiting cross ownership of banks and brokers. The leaders to drop the acts prohibition in the 1990s were Republican Phil Gramm and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Unlocking the previously closed ...