Today's view from the peanut gallery

As I start to get my sea legs with this blog I am going to be trying some new things as I think of them. Today is the debut of the peanut gallery, where I will pass along information morsels gleaned from my information aggregating efforts. It will not be a daily feature, but I will try and post as many as I can.  I have also been working on my next theme, Yang, which will focus on solutions to some of the challenges that face us (Ying) which is why I began this blog.  And now on to the gallery:


Domestic financial markets:


Great comment from Joe Donohue at Dimension trading,

....the market takes bad news pretty well,

Headlines from CNBC on the non organic (High Frequency Trading) rally:

 President Obama to present a range of policy options that could create up to a million new jobs.

If you are interested in real numbers, check out a real time Price Index as provided by MIT.

 
International financial markets:


So what is going to happen next week when Europe returns from vacation and we see that nothing has improved and the can has just been kicked another month down the path?
To summarize, Finland is not going to fund Greece unless they get cash collateral, which Germany and France are not going to let happen. Italy  knows that they are too big to fail and want to get to the trough before Spain so they are pushing back on their "reforms" and "austerity" mandates from the German overlords. How about this for a solution, combine two of the largest insolvent Greek banks and have them "nationalized" by an insolvent government and pledge their worthless stock for collateral. I know, it's about as bizarre as Bruce Pearl peddling groceries.

Geopolitical:

Israel is really becoming strained by having to open a defense front on their Sinai border with Egypt. It took everything they had to defend their previous borders with Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian states but all of these are dwarfed by their exposure to Egypt. They just do not have the population and resources to defend so much additional exposure. The Egyptian military regime has adopted a much more pro-Islamist lean and have allowed significant jihadist infiltration into the vast desert region. This is a very real flash point and once Israel takes on Egypt they are all in. 

Conspiracy theory of the day:

China has the world's biggest energy appetite and is gobbling up every resource they can buy or steal. One area where they have had very good success in the countries in North Africa. Could the "NATO" effort to toss out Gadhafi really be about not letting China displace Italy as the real owner of the spigot?