Insights

The stock market acts like it wants to go higher but yesterday's announcement that ratings agency S&P has put 15 European nations on negative credit watch chopped a nice rally in half. Of the 17 Eurozone nations only Cyprus and Greece escaped being included - Cyprus...

For about two years now we have had a strong pattern repeated several times in which the stock markets in the US and Europe go down on worries over Europe, go up on hopeful announcements of measures to deal with the crisis only to see European leaders under-deliver....

While the unemployment rate dropped to 8.6% from 9%, the participation rate, i.e. those of working age that are actually working dropped in this report to 62.3%, the lowest level since 1984. Put another way, the ratio of those working compared to those that are not...

The government reported today that the unemployment rate dropped this month from 9% to 8.6%. That's a huge drop for one month so it may be revised upward later. What many people don't realize is that the reported unemployment rate includes a lot of adjustments for...

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...