Thursday, August 27, 2009

Aimlessness

Greetings good citizen,

For the third straight session the markets ‘wandered’ as they seemed torn between fishing and cutting bait. Actually, something happened mid-morning that arrested what looks like a pretty stiff downward slide and it took the rest of the day for the markets to return to positive territory, so things aren’t as placid as they seem to be.

Perhaps we’ll get a hint about what lies ahead in tonight’s offering

Shares Wander Through Day but Close Higher


By GERRY SHIH
Published: August 27, 2009

As it did for most of the week, Wall Street spent Thursday searching for direction. [Oddly, it picked a ‘direction’ as soon as the markets opened and it took ‘em a while to turn it around.]

The main indexes spent Thursday morning in the red but climbed into positive territory after an afternoon rebound in oil prices and the energy sector. [There’s more on this topic later in the article, but this statement is disturbing all by itself…]

Encouraging pieces of economic data on employment and gross domestic product failed to impress investors, as they seemed content to book profits on another day of listless trading. [Wait another dog gone minute Slim, GDP remained stable (which is being hailed as a win because they say expectations were the number would go down…and the ‘good news’ in employment is that more people have exhausted their claims, which isn’t good news at all.]

“It’s the summertime, with a little bit of economic data and low volume profit-taking,” said Anthony Dwyer, an equity market strategist at FTN Equity Capital Markets. “It could be as simple as that. We use these employment numbers as an excuse rather than reason.

The Labor Department said that initial unemployment claims last week fell by 10,000 from the prior week, to 570,000. It was the first decline in three weeks, but fell short of economists’ expectations by 5,000. The four-week moving average was 566,250, a decrease of 4,750 from the previous week’s 571,000.

The government also left its second-quarter estimate of the gross domestic product unchanged; some analysts had feared that revisions might show a worse contraction than the 1 percent annualized decline initially reported.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 37.11 points, or 0.39 percent, to 9,580.63. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index gained 2.86 points, or 0.28 percent, to 1,030.98. The Nasdaq composite index climbed 3.3 points, or 0.16 percent, to 2,027.73.

Equity analysts kept an eye on the price of oil, which, like stocks, recovered from an early stumble, to settle at $72.49 a barrel, up $1.06, on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

At one point on Thursday morning, crude prices fell below $70 a barrel on a report showing high inventory levels in the United States and concerns of low refiner demand.

“If you look in the historical realm, we’re way ahead of ourselves inventory-wise,” said Tom Bentz, senior energy analyst at BNP Paribas. “The market is choosing to focus on fundamentals again for a short period.” [Still the ‘mystery’ remains, we are ‘swimming’ in oil yet the price continues to rise, how the hell does that work? Probably works the same way as banks losing billions of dollars while handing out billions more in bonus checks…]

Shares of Chevron and Exxon Mobil, two Dow components, closed relatively flat after falling by more than 1.7 percent during intraday trading.

Shares of Boeing, which announced that it would test fly its long-delayed 787 Dreamliner by the end of year, rose more than 8 percent, or $4, to $51.82.

Shares of the insurance giant American International Group continued to climb on Thursday, jumping 27 percent, or $10.15, to $47.84. The stock has risen more than 400 percent since July 9. [Isn’t it amazing what a government guarantee can do for your share price?]

The latest jump came on speculation that A.I.G. could benefit from a better relationship with its former chief executive, Maurice R. Greenberg.

Robert H. Benmosche, who was named chief executive earlier this month, told Reuters that he has been in regular contact with Mr. Greenberg, who led A.I.G. for almost 40 years. “I want to get the benefit of his criticisms or his support,” Mr. Benmosche said, according to Reuters.


What’s this look like to you good citizen? Has Mr. Greenberg succeeded in planting a sock puppet at the head of his former empire? It doesn’t matter because the government guarantee isn’t worth spit.

For that matter, there’s no saying for sure what anything is worth since the chiselers started down the path of ‘funny money’.

It’s all ‘make believe’ now.

How’s that old Soviet saying go, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us…”

Well, sadly, that’s where we’re at right now only most folks haven’t caught on yet. The money doesn’t look any different than the ‘good stuff’ so nobody knows the difference yet the evidence is all around us.

Hundreds of trillions of dollars are being tossed around like they were nothin’…which is a lot closer to the truth than most suspect.

The money’s all ‘funny’ now, they could ‘delete’ half of it and still have too much, but no, prices continue to rise.

When criminals take over the government, you get the kind of government that benefits criminals and no one else.

I know this last bit skips way ‘off topic’ in a sense…the mind recoils at being exposed to so much naked truth in such a short space but there it is.

If the world’s GDP = 53 trillion dollars, where the hell does a quadrillion dollars worth of CDS come from?

The answer is pretty simple, it’s all make believe…but we’re talking life and death here in the land of ‘let’s pretend’.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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