MARKET COMMENT
Dave Fry at ETF Digest, February 11, 2009
Those people away from the American Idol crowd are pretty pissed. They don’t really know where to focus their anger but the outrage is widespread.
Congress has targeted bank CEOs today for a public dressing down.
The good:
The bad:
The dimwit:
Meanwhile back at the ranch, markets were open for business today and, boy, it was a lot of fun wasn’t it? I would color today both uninspiring and messy. Many traditional relationships (dollar/gold/bonds/energy, for example) are out of whack. Much of this is a continuation of the disappointment from Geithner’s proposals and uncertainty/confusion over the direction of the Obama administration’s plans. With confidence lacking normal relationships seem broken.
It appears that Yahoo Finance has either given up on trying to calculate the correct volume data or, perhaps their minions are in the lab trying to do it right.
If you have a chance during your busy day to watch C-SPAN or the radio you can see just what passes for intelligence from our elected officials. It should take a lot more than seniority, like an intimate knowledge of the subject, to be on any committee. But, with some rare exceptions, we don’t have representatives with the proper set of skills. It should become obvious but then we keep reelecting them. Then we get what we deserve.
People are definitely pissed-off at our financial situation. They’re looking to Washington to solve their problems. They may be expecting too much beyond posturing and an aura of change.
One thing many have been expecting occurred today. The US is being lectured by China about how to run its financial affairs from this article in Bloomberg. Yu Yongding states: “China should seek guarantees that our holding of US government debt won’t be eroded by reckless policies.” Perhaps just payback for Geithner’s lecturing them about the artificial level of their currency.
The rebound today wasn’t very dynamic and there’s not much else on the agenda before a long weekend that can lift prices in my opinion. The world is much interconnected despite what some may have you believe but it would appear the US is heading for a long-term decline.
Let’s see how things play out.
Disclaimer: Among other issues the ETF Digest maintains positions in: QQQQ, IEF, TLT, FXE, GLD, DGP, GDX, XLE, EWY, EWZ, IFN and FXI.
