Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Wall Street 'snaps' two-day losing streak...

Greetings good citizen,

For most of the day it appeared the markets were going to close lower again today…but NO, at the end of the trading day the markets shot back into positive territory to snap a 2 day losing streak (on what must have been downright anemic volume.)

Honestly good citizen, only a psychopath would trade in these hugely manipulated markets and only paid shills would advise you to do likewise.

Our first offering of the evening has had it’s headline modified to indicate the market’s ‘success’ at breaking the losing streak, such as it was. Tonight’s second offering has ‘disappeared’ from today’s line up.


Wall Street Tries to End 2-Day Losing Streak

By REUTERS
Published: December 9, 2009

Wall Street shares were little changed on Wednesday as an unexpected rise in October wholesale inventories was offset by continued concerns on foreign debt and a weak outlook in the technology sector.

Gains were limited by concerns over the credit ratings of Greece and Spain and an outlook from Texas Instruments, as chip makers are generally considered one of the first sectors to recover from recession. [Some chips are still made here, missing from this picture is the items the chips are used in, there isn’t a single domestic computer manufacturer so it should shock no one that there are no jobs here in the US.]

America’s total wholesale inventories rose 0.3 percent in October, according to data from the Commerce Department, reversing a 12-month declining trend. Analysts were expecting inventories to fall 0.5 percent. [Did you catch that good citizen? There’s that ‘America’ blanket statement again…Mexico and Canada are ‘in America’ too so where the hell are these idiots pointing to?]

Added to Friday’s above-consensus jobs report, the inventory figure “shows surprising resilience as we work to recover,” said Thomas Nyheim, portfolio manager at Christiana Bank & Trust Company in Greenville, Del. [Um, here we go again with the ‘who is this and why should I give a shit what they think’ commentary. That’s besides the fact that the statement can be interpreted any way you want…what’s this ‘resiliency’ he’s talking about? Inventories being resilient is seldom a good thing when sales are down by record proportions.]

January crude futures initially rose but later fell back about 0.4 percent to $72.34 a barrel after data showed an unexpected drawdown in crude inventories, a positive sign for potential demand. [Uh, there is another story on today’s wires claiming the exact opposite is true!]

All three major exchanges were flat in early afternoon trading. [I did hold off a while before collecting these news items today…]

Gold and oil rose as the dollar weakened.

The Nasdaq was pressured a day after Texas Instruments gave a fourth-quarter earnings view that disappointed some investors who had hoped for a stronger outlook on signs of improving demand. The stock fell 2.6 percent to $25.65. [Is this just the beginning or is it the end for domestic semiconductor stocks?]

“People didn’t love the T-I news, especially since that company is such a barometer of what’s going on,” said Wayne Kaufman, chief market analyst at John Thomas Financial in New York. [Now that’s hillarious, the cheeky bastards named their financial services company with the ‘pet name’ for a penis.]

Stocks were also buffeted by concerns about the global recovery after ratings agency Standard & Poor’s revised its outlook on Spain to negative, one day after Fitch Ratings downgraded Greece’s debt rating. [Which is pretty surprising considering that NONE of these asshole ratings agencies got it right! Were I an investor the ratings agencies would serve as ‘contrary’ indicators!]

The move also comes after a potential debt default in Dubai raised concerns about the prospects for another global economic crisis. [Understand that the real problem facing investors is the crisis ‘SHOULD BE’ over but it isn’t (because nobody wants to accept any losses so nothing’s been ‘fixed’.) Leaving the ‘real economy’ to struggle along the best it can.]

Exchanges in Europe ended the day lower on those concerns. In London, the FTSE 100 was down 0.37 percent; the DAX in Frankfurt fell 0.72 percent; and the CAC-40 in Paris declined 0.74 percent.

In Asia, both the Nikkei in Tokyo and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong were down more than 1.3 percent after the Japan said its economy grew more slowly than estimated.


It’s that last bit I’d like to spend an additional moment on if I may…the entire run up to 10,000 points on the Dow has been based on the idea that the ‘global recovery’ was underway. While we encounter this new report telling us what we already know (That the Japanese economy is (and has remained) in the Tank, there is another post on the NY Times Business page crowing about the ‘robust’ recovery China is enjoying…

And you know that’s bullshit too! There isn’t a domestic market for the expendable crap we buy from them…there’s no ‘there, there!’ Which might be to say that Chinese ‘government statistics’ aren’t any more ‘reliable’ than the home grown ones…and there was another series of ‘exposes’ on the net regarding the most recent (incredible) unemployment figures….but this speaks to a much more disturbing dynamic at play, far more serious than the lies themselves.

Thank you for indulging me, we shall now proceed to tonight’s second offering

U.S. Wholesale Inventories Rise Unexpectedly

[Note how both of tonight’s offerings are ‘orphans’…]

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 9, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) — Businesses unexpectedly added to inventories at the wholesale level in October, breaking a string of 13 consecutive declines. It was a hopeful sign that companies will begin restocking depleted store shelves, helping to bolster the fragile economic recovery.

Wholesale inventories rose 0.3 percent in October, the Commerce Department said in a statement Wednesday, easily beating economists’ expectations of a 0.5 percent decline. Inventories dropped 0.8 percent in September. [Understand what you’re being told here good citizen, inventories climbed while unemployment remained at record levels…so this definitely isn’t a ‘good thing’…but there’s another ‘factor’ at work here. Since we make next to nothing ourselves…if inventories ‘rose’ it means they were ‘replenished’ by an off-shore source! And this has zero to do with domestic productivity! So this article tells us what, exactly?]

Sales at the wholesale level rose 1.2 percent in October, also stronger than the 0.7 percent rise economists expected. It followed a 1.3 percent increase in September and was the seventh consecutive month that sales at the wholesale level have risen. [This would be terrific news…if we made anything here! Oops! The line we have been searching for is right below us…wanna read a line of shit? Here it is!]

Steadily rising sales should help encourage businesses to restock shelves, increase production and bolster a broad recovery. The worry is the rebound could still falter if consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of economic activity, slumps in the face of continued high unemployment. [Um, there’s another ‘disturbing’ factor at work with that 70% of the economy figure they keep beating us over the head with…do you recall what it is? I didn’t think so. Here it is, of that 70% of the economy, only 20% of the population accounts for 80% of that spending and yeah, that 20% is just who you think it is, the ‘richest 20 %’ Does it look to you like out ‘economic model’ is broken? It sure looks busted to me!]

Wholesale inventories are goods held by distributors who generally buy from manufacturers and sell to retailers. They make up about 25 percent of all business stockpiles. Factories hold another third of inventories and retailers hold the rest. [So the ‘uptick’ in wholesale inventories is essentially meaningless if retailers aren’t drawing that inventory down.]

Even with the slight rise, wholesale inventories at a seasonally adjusted $326.1 billion were still 13.5 percent below the year-ago level. Still, the October increase marked the first gain since a 0.7 percent rise in August 2008. [Um, there you have it good citizen, a lot of crowing about ‘nuthin’.]

With the rise in sales outpacing the rise in inventories, the inventory to sales ratio slipped to 1.16. That means it would take 1.16 months to deplete existing inventories at the October sales pace. It marked the seventh consecutive month that the inventory-to-sales ratio has fallen. [This number is likely ‘thin’ because everybody knows the consumer is broke and nothing has been done to alter that fact.]

Economists are hoping that inventory rebuilding will provide a key support to economic growth in the current quarter. The overall economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, rose at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the July-September quarter, the first increase after a record four straight quarterly declines. [Most concur that the 2.8% GDP growth is due to governmental stimulus measures and not ‘real’ economic activity…tax receipts are way off and spell certain doom for many communities across the nation.]

A switch to rebuilding stockpiles could trigger higher factory production and economic growth. [Show me the customers, which can only be done after you show them the paychecks! ‘Switch to rebuilding stockpiles indeed!’ Welcome to Wall Street where the Happy Talk never stops and neither does the denial of reality!]

But consumer spending remains a concern. The unemployment rate dipped to 10 percent in November, down slightly from a 26-year high of 10.2 percent set in October.


Do you really believe the unemployment rate dropped in November? Worse good citizen, the BLS even ‘re-visited’ September’s and October’s numbers and essentially ‘cut them in half’. There is no basis in reality for doing this, what we’re seeing is ‘political expedience’ at its worst!

Politicians have become so used to molding the data to fit the desired outcome that they think the public is so totally disconnected from a reality that continually bites them on the ass that they can lie without getting caught, a mistake that is always fatal.

It is hard to tell if it is a ‘net positive’ that this is the article that ‘disappeared’ from the NY Times story list, although it was there most of the day.

I think Mr. Michaelson said it best the other day in his column, something needs to be done and a ballot box has no part in it…it’s well beyond that.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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