With the benchmark Federal Funds rate already down to 1.0%, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben. S. Bernanke has only so much room for another cut (although many economists are predicting an additional half-percentage-point cut at the Dec.15-16 meeting).

The Fed extended the lives of recently initiated programs (lending facilities for investment firms, for instance) and is exploring additional moves (like Treasury purchases) aimed at reviving the credit markets.  Bernanke believes more needs to be done to slow the pace of foreclosures, especially since they jumped another 10% in September.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury Department is working on a plan to rejuvenate the housing market by slashing mortgage rates to 4.5% on new purchases.  Experts say that at some point these stimuli must take hold, but that’s not necessarily true.

This week’s economic calendar is highlighted by two late-week releases that are sure to garner much analysis.  The producer price index (PPI) brings another

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Greater reference has been made in recent times to the association between blog readership and market reversals, not just from Barry's TheBigPicture from this past February and March, but also in the spikes in volume for TraderMike, Traderfeed, and my personal blog. So for this paper napkin research I did some analysis of my personal blog web traffic. I converted my visitors number using the same calculation as used for on-balance-volume; termed on-balance-visits. When the S&P closed higher I added my blog readership to a cumulative total, when it closed lower I subtracted it. Overall, I experienced strong readership growth; moving from around 400 visits a day in October 2007 to the 700 currently:By using an on-balance-visit calculation I can sidestep some of the concerns which may effect other metric calculations ...