No theme today, but mostly it's currencies

[solarbird]

Oil bounced off $111/barrel on Thursday. In the overnight, the US dollar is under ¥100, albeit barely. The basket's at 71.74, and the Euro at US$1.564. Is this what capital flight looks like? Interestingly, over the last couple of weeks, the Yuan conversion rate suddenly leveled off, and stayed essentially flat - until the last couple of days, when the dollar started heading down against the Yuan again, too. Central banks are now officially alarmed and planning action.

The mid-March H3 is out, banks are still in massive reserves default; about a -$8B swing since the previous release at the end of February; that puts us back at the mid-February lows. Also, today, somebody asked for $117.250B from the Fed overnight and didn't get it. That's not counting the $80B TAF (going up to $100B), much less the longer-term $200B new facility.

Some bullet items:

• Minyanville wants to know how anyone could call the lousy sales report "unexpected." Seriously, people.
• Mish says market internals on the S&P500 still look bearish; the NASDAQ looks a bit better. Given that it never recovered from the dot-com crash, can you make an argument that this only makes sense? I've no idea. Some are suggesting that the low volume is indicative of buy moves by large agencies; I don't know how that's supposed to work either, unless it assumes that everyone else is sitting this mess out right now.
• Things are getting ugly in Florida, as fights break out and riot police come in to quell a proto-riot at the Boca Raton Housing Authority.
• Brad Setser's post, "central bank intervention ... unprecedented in size and scope," has a better than typical set of news links in the comments.
• We're Not Immune: insanely overpriced condos on the Kitsap peninsula going to auction at 50% off, which makes their prices only somewhat too high. I really do consider the original build prices to have been absolutely batshit insane, even for the boom era, up here.

And now the dollar's popped up a bit, up against its lows. Small moves, but widely distributed.

Comments

regarding NASDAQ

[oh6.livejournal.com]

If you'll excuse an anecdotal non-event, I have been noticing a curious absence of hatch-battening at the engineering software company where I work. They seemed to move pretty quickly to weather the crash, but they may not have any particular plan to deal with something like this.

[ravyngyngvar.livejournal.com]

I must admit that I know very little about economy, and most everything you write on the topic is Greek to me. However, I keep following the dollar rate to Norwegian kroner. I have NOK 5 as a marker, and it looks as if the dollar will drop below that any day now. Right now, it's at 5.07.

I'd really like to visit you again to do some shopping. :)

[solarbird]

Hee. Well, yay, someone can get something out of it. It'd be fun to have you come by again if you wanted, I think Anna would enjoy that too. ^_^