The Market On Monday

Good morning. It is 66 degrees and cloudy here in Upstate NY. The logo is spelling out sunshine later on, we shall see. Out walking earlier I was thinking about this week coming up. Let's hope that this week is a little less intense than recent previous weeks - no mass killings please, let's have some good news. Maybe the Olympics can help with that. I was pleased to see that Richard A. Muller, University of California, Berkeley physics professor, has finally acknowledged humanity's contribution to global warming. Apparently he recognized that there is a price to pay for pumping billions of tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. What on Earth are these FOX News people thinking? Do they really think you can endlessly pump carbon monoxide into the atmosphere and that it magically goes away. What is the physics of that magic thank you, can you please explain that.

At 8:10 a.m. futures are slightly lower, the dollar is mostly up against major world currencies, and the price of oil is down per barrel. The market is poised to open lower.

Besides the continued batch of second quarter corporate results, investors are concerned about an upcoming Fed meeting which involves the Euro Central Bank, all with the intent to boost the economy - presumably the economies of Europe and the US and consequently the globe. Tired of the eurozone financial crisis, investors want to see action to somehow resolve the mess. As we have seen, lengthy step by step plans never seem to enter into these kinds of equations. Instead one would suspect they go for a mass infusion of money quantitative easing, along with austerity. Austerity measures are fundamentally determining that there are sick yet sweet spots in a country's economy, usually sectors that were up to this point publicly held, and announcing that these sectors will be privatized. Get used to it.

CNN: Stocks: Investors on central bank watch

Expectations are high for the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank to announce new measures to boost the economy when they meet later this week.


Spain's economy continued to shrink for a third straight quarter.