Monday, April 23, 2012

The Market On Monday

Good morning. It is 39 degrees and raining here in Upstate NY. I hope you had an excellent weekend. My weekend was active with the highlight being dinner at a phenomenal restaurant on Saturday night. I had the salmon with the Creole shrimp topping, and yes it was delicious. Plus the basketball gods were good letting my NY Knicks beat a very competitive Atlanta Hawks team on Sunday afternoon. The playoffs begin very soon.

At 7:50 a.m. futures are holy crap significantly down, the dollar is up against most major world currencies, and the price of oil is down per barrel. The market will open with a steep decline.

What a difference a day makes. After tremendous optimism being expressed in the financial articles on Sunday about how investors would be more than likely pleased with a week filled with better than expected corporate results accompanied with an increase in the indexes, we shift into reverse gear right off the bat on Monday.

So much for optimism.

Europe and China are back in focus. Europe is going through not only a debt/ financial crisis but also political turmoil with both France and Holland about to change leaders. Wall Street likes consistency, not change. Holland may also be on the edge of losing its pleasing triple AAA credit rating. China on the other hand is reporting a small slowdown in its monolithic manufacturing complex.

Something tells me that if the corporate reports continue to come through above expectations then today's losses will be recouped later on in the week. That's a bold prediction.

CNN: Stocks: Europe and China weigh on sentiment
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, one of the architects of the European agreement to avert sovereign debt default, finished in second place...


...Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is expected to resign...


...Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Lagarde warned at meetings of the IMF and World Bank over the weekend that the "dark clouds on the horizon" for the global economy threatened the "light recovery blowing in a spring wind."


...Chinese manufacturing released early Monday, showing a contraction in for the second straight month.

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