Friends Let’s talk about the economy for a moment before we touch on politics. As we discussed earlier, the GDP number for the 2nd quarter was very anemic. What was even worse was the revision downward of the 1st quarter GDP number. I know it is backward looking, but...

Friends As the politicians continue to make a mess out of the debt ceiling situation, the market has decided to weigh in and make its view perfectly clear. For the third day this week stocks fell, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling more than 198 points,...

Friends As the political sniping and fear mongering continues in Washington, stocks have seen two very quiet down days. As a matter of fact, the market looked like it might want to end in positive territory before news from the White House, that the President would...

Friends Just a thought as we begin trading this week. It seems the press is convinced that the markets are going to force Congress into action by collapsing. Perhaps, but it seems that both the stock market and the bond market don’t want to cooperate. Bond yields...

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...