Insights

Nothing much to report today. As is the norm, the market was flat today, digesting yesterday's gains as they say. There was not much news aside from company-specific news other than that China's manufacturing report came in below breakeven, meaning manufacturing there...

Tiny but I think the best ratings firm Egan-Jones today downgraded France's credit rating and put it on negative credit watch. S&P and Moody's still have it AAA but E-J had already cut it to AA- and reduced that today to A. S&P "too big to fail" bank credit downgrades...

I mentioned in my more detailed post below that if the Fed embarked on QE3 that would provide more fodder for a market rally. Another news story that would accomplish the same is if the Germans, Dutch, Fins and the ECB cave to great pressure and allow the work-around...

Wow! Twice in the last 3 days US markets have jumped 3.5% at the start of trading, following big jumps in Europe. The first one was due to the most important EU leaders say they are working together to put in place tighter fiscal policy control over member nations,...

Stocks moved up first thing this morning but could not hold the gains and finished in the middle. Corporate and high yield bonds were higher, high quality bonds were lower. Oil was up almost 2% while gold had a small gain. In Europe, banks are cutting back on lending....

After 7 down days in a row, the market rallied yesterday on better than expected shopping news for the Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday and news in Europe that the biggest countries were pushing for a closer fiscal union for the Eurozone (17 countries) and...

Sigh . . . another trading day, another down day and European troubles continue to worsen rapidly. I lightened up more on stocks today and have orders cued for Friday, Monday or a snap-back rally day. Traders are slowly selling everything except US treasuries right...

The US stock indexes could not quite get back to breakeven and spent a second day down a little, 0.4%. Europe was also down. The revised GDP estimate for 3Q 2011 came in at 2.0%, lower than the 2.5% original forecast and lower than expectations. The Fed minutes from...

I hear people talking about this being like the Fall of 2008. Let's go back and read selected (some slightly modified) headlines from 2008 from www.creditwritedowns.com/credit-crisis-timeline/  2008 03 14 JPMorgan and Fed Move to Bail Out Bear Stearns  2008 06 02...

An announcement you may not have heard this last Wed. may have a lot to do with how much we are going to pay at the pump. First, the worldwide price of oil is usually either quoted as the Brent Sea price (close by the U.K.) or WTI, meaning West Texas Intermediate as...