Friends As we continue to wait for our politicians to come up with a plan to deal with the debt ceiling crisis and a debt reduction deal in general, we got news last night that the French and Germans came up with a “restructuring” deal for Greek debt. At least the...
Friends All day long we got rumors about deals being made over the debt situation, only to be followed up by denials from both the White House and John Boehner’s office. In the meantime, stock traders want to believe that eventually one of these rumors will be true,...
Friends “The waiting is the hardest part Everyday you see one more card You take it on faith, you take it to the heart The waiting is hardest part” So says the old Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song. Here we wait for politicians to decide the credit worthiness of...
Friends Fed Chairman Bernanke testified before the House today and the main headline to emerge was that, if necessary, there could be a QE3. That’s right. If things get bad enough, the Fed would consider more asset purchases, etc. Never mind that QE2 had no positive...
Friends Another Monday, another European nation in debt trouble. Today’s contestant is Italy. As we have said for some time, this contagion will continue until Europe addresses the problem in total. Here at home, we need to address the debt problem also, and political...
Friends What’s the deal? I leave town for a couple of days and the market goes up 1000 Dow points (no clever remarks on how maybe I should just stay away). Unfortunately, the stock market’s remarkable 8-day run seems to have been doused, temporarily, by this morning’s...
Friends What a change a week makes. Stocks ended the 2nd quarter with a four-day flurry which saw the Dow rise over 152 points to close the quarter at 12,413. Whether it was end of quarter “window dressing” or simply investors deciding that the soft economy was only...
Friends, Stocks have had two very nice days back to back, albeit on very light volume, but we’ll take it. While we await tomorrow’s austerity vote in Greece, stocks are benefiting from money managers “fixing up” their portfolios before quarter end. We don’t want to...
Friends I felt like I was riding an elevator all day today. The market started today in a downward fashion as lingering disappointment in Fed Chairman Bernanke’s comments from yesterday seemed to weigh on the market. Then came word that the U.S. was going to release...
Friends We got the Fed announcement today as well as the second Bernanke press conference, and the take away for us was that Dr. Bernanke has no intention of raising interest rates anytime soon, and should it become absolutely necessary, additional measures would be...
Friends, It seems like we have seen this movie before. The markets continue to focus on the problems in Greece, as the Eurozone folks try to come up with a way to continue to delay what seems like the inevitable. At some point, the world will have to actually deal...
Friends, As you know, we have been talking about the liquidity vs. reality story for two and a half years now. We have said repeatedly, don’t fight the Fed. As long as Dr. Bernanke and the Fed were going to provide endless amounts of liquidity, stocks and bonds were...
Friends The just reported jobs number was extremely disappointing, but not that surprising after we got a heads up on Wednesday from the ADP number that job creation has slowed. Along with that, the unemployment rate is ticking back up with the reported number today...
Friends May ended up being a very choppy month with a negative bias for the markets. We saw commodity prices fall drastically early in the month, but as the month came to a close, many commodity prices were climbing slowly higher. Stocks ended up down 1.4% for the S&P...
Friends The markets continue to be sloppy as we approach this holiday weekend. Stocks have had a downward bias in May as economic numbers continue to show a very slow growth environment (if, indeed, you can call it growth at all). The S&P 500, for the time being, is...
