Consumers Seem to Be Less Concerned With Gas Prices This Time Around; Media However is Hyping The Issue

An interesting turn of events from Google Trends…  

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More and more we’re hearing about how 2012 is similar to 2007.

For example, yesterday Albert Edwards put out this chart of stalled earnings momentum, comparing the current scene to 2007.

And just now on CNBC, ECRI’s Lakshman Achutchan hinted at the comparison in defending his recession call.

And then of course, there’s the growing oil price doom drumbeat. Just like 2007, prices are shooting up.

But basically, that’s where the comparisons stop.

In 2006-2007, initial jobless claims were steadily drifting higher. Now they’re dropping like a rock.

In 2006-2007, housing starts were dropping like a rock. Now they’re rising.

Along the same lines, total employment growth was decelerating on an annual basis in 2006-2007, whereas now it’s accelerating.

In 2006-2007 car sales were declining precipitously. Now they’re surging.

So the comparison to 2007 is pretty thin. Sure there are some superficial similarities regarding oil prices, but when you look at the sharply different direction in car sales, home sales, and housing starts, it’s really not even that close.

Read more: http://trade.cc/apdg#ixzz1nJ4CRGSx

A reiteration of Fisher’s call yesterday. The divide on monetary policy grows since the last fed meeting.

A f’d up story that you as a consumer should think about when purchasing any product. Know where and how your stuff comes from!

A minor bank run continues under the stress of the sovereign debt crisis….

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Landlords in Europe have to roll over $779 billion in debt as the banking industry is shrinking…. 

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“Stocks rose and oil extended its longest winning streak in two years as data from the U.S. to South Korea signaled an economic recovery. The cost of insuring European government debt fell and the yen weakened.

The Stoxx Europe 600 Index added 0.3 percent at 7:45 a.m. in New York. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures climbed 0.3 percent. Oil in New York advanced 0.5 percent. The yen slipped 1 percent against the euro, reaching the weakest level since November. The cost of insuring against a default on European government bonds fell for the first time in four days.

U.S. home sales probably climbed to a nine-month high, economists said before a Commerce Department report today, a day after data showed jobless claims held at a four-year low. South Korea’s central bank said consumer confidence jumped to a three- year high. Finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 nations meet tomorrow in Mexico and may discuss committing fresh cash to the International Monetary Fund to defuse the European fiscal crisis.

“On a short term basis the U.S. economy looks pretty good,” Kelvin Tay, chief investment strategist at UBS Wealth Management in Singapore, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “Many of the people who missed out on the initial rally are likely to be chasing the market and pushing up the market another leg.”

More than two shares climbed for every one that dropped in the Stoxx 600. (SXXP) Telecom Italia SpA jumped 5.7 percent after posting full-year profit before some items that climbed 7.3 percent and forecasting “broadly stable” earnings and revenue this year. Eiffage SA surged 12 percent for the biggest rally on the Stoxx 600 (SXXP) as Chief Executive Officer Pierre Berger said net income and sales at the French builder will climb in 2012. SAP AG added 2.3 percent after its board recommended an 83 percent increase to the software company’s dividend.

Home Sales

The advance in S&P 500 futures indicated that the benchmark measure will extend yesterday’s 0.4 percent gain. Home sales climbed 2.6 percent to a 315,000 annual pace in January, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of 77 economists.

The euro rose 0.3 percent to $1.3410, appreciating to the highest level since December. The yen weakened against all 16 major peers, falling for the seventh day versus the euro….”

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“Euro-area banks may tap the European Central Bank next week for almost as much three-year cash as they did in December in an operation that could prolong a rally in bond markets.

Financial institutions will ask the ECB for 470 billion euros ($629 billion) in three-year funds for allotment on Feb. 29, the median of 28 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey shows. While that’s less than the record 489 billion euro take-up at the first tender on Dec. 21, it may increase total cash in the system by more than 300 billion euros, saidLuca Cazzulani, a senior fixed-income strategist at UniCredit SpA (UCG) in Milan.

“Part of the increase will likely be parked, at least temporarily, in the sovereign-bond market and support mainly the performance of Italian and Spanish bonds,” said Cazzulani. Still, “expectations are at a pretty high level, which creates some room for disappointment,” he said. “Gross demand below 400 billion euros would likely put upward pressure on spreads in the short term.”

Italian and Spanish bonds have risen since the ECB’s first three-year loan, suggesting banks are investing at least some of the money in higher yielding assets. That’s helped ease concern about a credit crunch and won governments time to agree on measures to contain the sovereign debt crisis….”

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Asia

Europe The Russian Micex is up 3.3%…full retard

Futures

Currencies

Commodities

LIBOR, EURIBOR, 10 year yields for Italy, Spain, France, and Germany

Strangely, the current run-up in prices comes despite sinking demand in the U.S. “Petrol demand is as low as it’s been since April 1997,” says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. “People are properly puzzled by the fact that we’re using less gas than we have in years, yet we’re paying more.”

Kloza believes much of the increase is due to speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers. “We’ve seen about $11 billion of speculative money come in on the long side of gas futures,” he says. “Each of the last three weeks we’ve seen a record net long position being taken.”

Read the rest here.

Today, without much fanfare, US debt to GDP hit 101% with the latest issuance of $32 billion in 2 Year Bonds. If the moment when this ratio went from double to triple digits is still fresh in readers minds, is because it is: total debt hit and surpassed the most recently revised Q4 GDP on January 30, or just three weeks ago. Said otherwise, it has taken the US 21 days to add a full percentage point to this most critical of debt sustainability ratios: but fear not, with just under $1 trillion in new debt issuance on deck in the next 9 months, we will be at 110% in no time.

Read the rest here.

Live Charts – Crude Oil Chart and Live Oil prices

By Simon Carr

At a public meeting in the Commons, the climate scientist Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT made a number of declarations that unsettle the claim that global warming is backed by “settled science”. They’re not new, but some of them were new to me.

Over the last 150 years CO2 (or its equivalents) has doubled. This has been accompanied by a rise in temperature of seven or eight tenths of a degree centigrade.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes half this increase to human activity.

Lindzen says: “Claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a Greenhouse Effect, and that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true but essentially meaningless.”

He said our natural body temperature varies by eight tenths of a degree.

He showed a Boston newspaper weather graphic for a day – it had the actual temperature against a background of the highest and lowest recorded temperature for that day. The difference was as much as 60 degrees F.

When you double CO2 there’s a two per cent change in the “radiation budget”. Yet two billion years ago, the sun was 20 to 30 per cent dimmer – and the planet’s temperature was about the same.

The Al Gore graph showing CO2 and temperature rising and falling in tandem showed that the release of CO2 from the oceans was prompted by warming, not vice versa.

He gave us a slide with a series of familiar alarms – melting ice caps, disappearing icebergs, receding glaciers, rising sea levels. It was published by the US Weather Bureau in 1922.

And one further element of the consensus: there’s been no increase in temperature for 15 years.

He concluded with an exposition of science that, frankly, I didn’t follow. However, the reliability and explanatory power of climate models was satirised convincingly. And I found myself believing – or accepting the possibility – that warming would reduce rather than increase tropical storms.

He also said that the IPCC needs “positive feedback mechanisms” to justify anything above a one degree C  increase in their predictions. But: “Observation points to small negative feedbacks.”

How to explain the procession of eminent opinion leaders – some even in our own Royal Society – who advance the tenets of catastrophic global warming? “It is science in the service of politics,” he said.

If Lindzen is right, we will never be able to calculate the trillions that have been spent on the advice of “scientists in the service of politics”.

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By JAMES KANTER

Published: February 22, 2012

BRUSSELS — During the past decade, the European Union blazed a green trail with a series of laws mandating a low-carbon economy and promises to set an example for other parts of the world.

That now seems like another era.

A succession of economic crises has pushed European governments to pare subsidies to clean-energy sectors like solar power and has undermined initiatives in other areas like energy efficiency, where member states balked at binding targets.

The E.U. Emissions Trading System — the Union’s flagship climate policy, which requires industries to acquire emissions permits — has been battered by extreme volatility, tax fraud, recycling of used credits, suspicions of profiteering and online attacks.

Many factories and utilities also received more free permits than they needed under the system, helping ensure that the price of the permits has never been high enough, for long enough, to push polluters to invest in cleaner alternatives.

The latest complication for Europe’s green agenda is the prospect of trade wars with important partners like the United States and China at a time when the Union can least afford threats to jobs and growth.

The most high-profile dispute focuses on a law requiring all airlines using airports within the Union to join the Emissions Trading System. About 30 governments met in Moscow this week to discuss barring their carriers from participating and other forms of retaliation.

There are other disputes brewing.

Read the rest here.

The correlation between oil prices and equities has fallen to the lowest level since April last year as the Iranian nuclear row and related oil price jump have swooped back onto the radar for global investors.

Until recently equities and oil have tended to move in the direction. Oil price moves have been primarily demand driven  – euro zone credit woes easing and better economic data from the U.S. have been good for oil and equity prices.

If oil prices start to rise due to worries about supply rather than improving growth expect equities to suffer. As the chart below shows the correlation between the two assets went negative last year as investors worried how much the spreading Arab spring may hit oil supply.

To read the rest and see the interesting chart, go here.

Updated | 4:49 p.m. Using footage recorded by a French photographer who was in Homs this month, Britain’s Channel 4 News has produced a remarkable portrait of urban warfare in the Syrian city, between government forces and the lightly armed fighters of the Free Syrian Army.

The 11-minute video report broadcast on Wednesday night features scenes of everyday life in the city divided along sectarian lines, and shows a battle between the rebels and government snipers for control of a local headquarters of the mukhabarat, or secret police.

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