Last Friday I talked about the economic “calm before the storm” week, but the opposite was true for weather related incidents during this week. Storm Sandy has halted US market activities for the past two days and finally things are from a market perspective back to normal and Sandy didn’t had any major effects on the market direction.
Let’s recap the activity since Monday. Up till now things remained pretty flat as expected and while everybody was talking about Sandy, the economic world had some interesting news as well. Yesterday we saw the Bank of Japan announced further stimulus action which would make this the Japanese version of QE-9. News out of Europe are getting worrying everyday, with the economy starting to slow down even more and countries like Germany are reporting the worst unemployment numbers since 3 years and overall Euro-zone unemployment is now higher than ever before.
This might mean bad news at next weeks Euro-Zone economic forecast for 2013 and the effects on the markets might be interesting. We also heard today that Greece might need additional help in form of further financial stimulus or a second hair-cut, because conditions in Greece are still not improving.
To get back to market activity, the only two noteworthy movers of today were Silver (+1.70%) and Palladium (2.02%), the rest was pretty much flat and if there are no further surprises I expect this trend to continue tomorrow.
Here are a collection of links which you should take a look at:
- Bank of Japan Announces Fresh Economic Stimulus
- German Jobs Machine Falters For First Time in Three Years
- Eric Sprott On America’s Great Endangered Species: “The 99%”
- Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Markets
- Why do the Germans want their gold back?
- Euro-Zone Unemployment Higher than Ever Before
- Euro Chiefs Set to Grant Greece Extension Amid Squabbles