Is trade leading crude and comdols?

A reader sent an email the other day asking us if we could stop being so depressing in Currency Currents. I told him we’d try. Unfortunately today isn’t the day as a plethora of depressing pronouncements have been promulgated and posted in our key news section above. And this is just a small sampling…ugghhh.

Seems global gloom is deepening and widening. If there is one glimmer it is that South Korea’s exports to China didn’t fall quite as much as they had last month. For it is China stimulus, coupled with the US, the world seems to be counting on to lift us from this morass.

SDRs Gaining Steam in the Press

Thomas Griffith was quoted as saying, “The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty.”

We can thank China and now Russia for staging news regarding a proposed SDR global reserve currency. Of course the media is on it leading into the G20. Perhaps not as fanatically as one might have expected considering the subject matter, but they’re on it.

We’ll ultimately wait till after the G20 for any real developments. If China and Russia find a way to get the nations (specifically the US) focused on world reserve currency discussion, then the intensity of reporting on this matter could easily ratchet up.

Angela sets off a smart bomb!

We expected a major G-20 bust, and thank goodness it is shaping up to be so. We say that not because we want global economic failure, but because we believed this idea that throwing more money at our problems was only a recipe for more pain and in no way represents a solution. And we were very pleased to see real global leadership from someone who can...

"This crisis did not come about because we issued little money but because we created economic growth with too much money, and it was not sustainable," German chancellor Angela Merkel told the Financial Times yesterday.

G‐20 bust in the making?

Does today’s price action foreshadow things to come after the G‐20 meeting? Or is it another chance to sell the dollar again at a higher price?

Right now, we are going with the former because we think the G‐20 will be a total bust. And given the penchant for all governments of late to crackdown on entrepreneurship and penalize the competent to carry the rest of the pack, anything that flows from the G‐20 seems highly unlikely to get economies moving again.