It’s hard to pin down how I feel about the market today. Commodities and equities are moving in synch, with the U.S. dollar sitting at the other end of the See-Saw of Pain. In the short-term, it seems like both equities and commodities will float higher on a flood of government money. In the longer-term, the challenges facing the markets, the US economy, the global economy and the environment are only getting worse.
In short, this is the kind of market in which you can go broke or make money or BOTH, in the short-term and the long-term.
Here are the top stories I think are interesting today …
1. Zero Hedge provides a link to some seriously depressing statistics in “The End of the End of the Recession.
2. Bernanke: This may be worse than Great Depression
Fed chief says growth will resume at 1% in the second half of this year
Asked when “this [recession] is going to end,” Bernanke said growth would return in the second half of 2009, likely at a 1% pace. The unemployment rate won’t peak until next year, he said.
3. Surging Earnings Estimates Signal 26% Advance for Shareholders of S&P 500
Analysts are raising U.S. profit estimates for the first time since credit markets froze two years ago, reducing valuations even after the steepest rally since the Great Depression.
4. Protesting steelworkers beat manager to death
About 30,000 Chinese steelworkers clashed with police in a protest over plans to merge their mill with another company, and they beat the company’s general manager to death, a human rights monitor said.
…
Beijing is trying to streamline China’s sprawling steel industry, the world’s largest, by orchestrating a series of mergers aimed at creating globally competitive producers. The mergers often are accompanied by layoffs that sometimes spark complaints that workers receive too little severance pay.
5. Main Street’s Sour Loans Surge
As the effects of the economic collapse began pouring down Main Street, the government last year was left holding a record $2.1 billion in write-offs of small business loans it had guaranteed.
It’s a sign that even as record profits re-emerge on Wall Street, thanks to massive government loans and guarantees for banks deemed too big to fail, the pain on Main Street is as profound as it’s been in half a century.
It looks as though The Arctic Ice Cap is now completely detached from Greenland. It is also completely detached from the Canadian Archipelagoes. That means it is now detached from land and is now free-floating. In short, the collapse is accelerating.
7. Mish has a good story on Preemptive Defaults. It’s his riff on a New York Times piece on how strapped consumers are increasingly deciding not to keep paying debts. Suddenly, banks that refused to adjust interest rates are very interested in talking. But they’ve missed the moment - the consumers have moved on.
8. 50 Ways to Kill Recovery Nearly every state government is required to balance its budget. When times are bad, jobs vanish, sales plummet, investment declines, and tax revenues fall precipitously-states have to raise taxes or cut spending, or both, and that’s precisely what they’re doing: amplifying the effects of the downturn, instead of mitigating them.
See also: U.S. States Stage Live Action Four Yorkshiremen Sketch
It has a great chart …
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