More debt problems showing up around the world.
Monday, February 22, 2010. 9:15 am.
George Soros, writing in the Financial Times this morning about the debt problems in Greece and its need for emergency rescue, says that “Makeshift assistance should be enough for Greece, but that leaves Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland. Together they constitute too large a portion of Euroland to be helped in this way. . . . the survival of Greece would still leave the future of the euro in question.”
International bankers warned over the weekend that Kuwait’s multi-billion dollar investment company industry could be wiped out by debt repayments on the leveraged investments made before the recession.”
Two weeks ago the bi-partisan Congressional Oversight Panel said in a 183 page report that 2,988 small U.S. banks are about to”get hit by a tidal wave of commercial-real estate loan failures”. That is approximately 38% of the 8,000 banks in the U.S.
Asian markets were up last night – except for China.
Most Asian markets closed up last night, recovering most of the big losses of their previous session, when they plunged sharply on the U.S. Fed’s hike in the Discount Rate.
But the Chinese stock market, which was closed all last week for holidays, didn’t have a big loss in the previous session to recover from. So China re-opened last night, and closed down 1/2%. Interesting.
Among individual countries:
Australia closed up 1.6%. Hong Kong closed up 2.4%. India closed up 0.3%. Indonesia closed up 0.4%. Japan closed up 2.7%. Singapore closed unchanged. South Korea closed up 2.1%. Taiwan closed up 1.6%.
If you’d like to see a three-month chart of these indexes and others, click here, and then click on any of the markets in the list at the left side of the page it takes you to.
Markets this Morning.
European markets are fractionally positive, up on average of about 0.2%.
Oil is up $.20 a barrel at $80.01 at the moment, back above $80.
Gold is down $1 an ounce at $1,122 at the moment, after gaining 2.3% last week.
Markets in the U.S.
In the U.S., a number of important economic reports will be coming out this week, mostly from the middle to end of the week, including Consumer Confidence, new home sales, existing home sales, etc.
I’m particularly interested in seeing the latest revision to 4th quarter GDP, which will be out Friday morning, given Europe’s report that its 4th quarter GDP growth unexpectedly slowed.
To see the full schedule of the week’s reports click here, and look at the left side of the page it takes you to.
Our pre-open indicators are somewhat positive, pointing to the Dow being up 30 points or so in the early going, not meaningful as to direction.
Stock Market Patterns.
The next weekly pattern is that the week after options expirations, which this week is, tends to be negative, particularly when the options expirations week was more positive than usual.
Interesting Charts of the Morning.
Commodities still looking positive in their recoveries from the pullback, but gold stocks less so, having only recovered about 30% of their decline.
Please scroll down to see other recent ‘Interesting Charts of the Morning’ and commentary.
To read my weekend newspaper column ‘Why Talk of Re-Regulation of Wall Street is Just Talk!’ click here!
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