The Market On Monday

Good morning and welcome to the first official week of Fall. I took my morning constitutional walk today and it is crisp and sunny out. I would call this weather - perfect. Perfect it is, and I suspect that most people just love the Fall. We will miss the Summer, it was a sturdy dry summer, and we all lived easy. Tomatoes were decent this year, very tasty.

At 8:00 a.m. future are modestly up, the price of oil is slightly up, and the dollar is mostly down against world currencies.

Investors will be spending the week parsing information on the housing sector. This is probably the largest "consumer spending" segment. Recall that housing consumer sentiment was the leading arrow of the Great Recession, all that bad mortgage debt packaged and sold around the world as if it were a meaningful investment. We still experience the repercussions.

The Fed will tell investors how the economy is doing on Tuesday. They will talk about the elusive nothing to zero interest rate one again.

Part of me has this suspicion that investors want to bring the indexes up and the fundamentals might not really be there to justify this. Its just a suspicion.

CNN: Stocks set for higher start

"Given that the economy is so reliant on consumer spending, any indication that some stability is being found in the housing market is one factor that could contribute to propelling stocks higher..."


At 10 a.m. ET, the National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo will release a report on housing affordability -- the first of a number of readings on the housing market due out this week.