And the currencies seem to be recovering this morning too, from the recent go around in the ring with the risk aversion campers. The currencies (except yen), were last seen yesterday up against the rope, doing their best imitation of the rope-a-dope.

But… This morning… The markets are just giddy about two pieces of data from Europe… First, German Investor Confidence as measured by the think tank, ZEW, beat the forecasts, and came in at the highest level in 3 years! That’s right, not since 2006, as German Investor Confidence been this high… For those of you keeping score at home… The Confidence Index number soared to 56.1 from 39.5 the previous month! WOW!

Last week, I told you how the German GDP had posted a positive number, and therefore the economy had exited the recession. I don’t believe the German economy to be “out of the woods” yet though… There are still things that go bump in the night that could very well drag the economic growth down… But for now… The Eurozone’s largest economy is basking in the sun of not only exiting a recession but a strong Investor Confidence report.

The other piece of data that has the risk takers fighting back for ground that was lost last week, was the U.K. inflation data that printed at 1.8%… Now, that sounds pretty low right? Well… You might recall that the Bank of England (BOE) had forecast a fall to 1% of inflation in the 3rd QTR… The other thing that makes 1.8% more robust than it looks is that the BOE has an inflation target of 2%, so… It’s knocking at the door of 2%, eh? Can you hear me knocking? On the window… Can’t you hear me knocking? On the door…

So… As I said it “seems” that the currencies are fighting back… But the move has been smallish in nature, but at least the euro has gained back the 1.41 handle, and the Aussie dollar has gained back the 82-cent handle, and so on, and so on…

The TIC’s data for June that printed yesterday was quite strong… For Long-Term Treasuries, that is… The short end got ambushed and was so weak that the positive for the Long-Term Treasuries was wiped out by the selling on the short end…

This probably all those people that bought short term T-Bills last year in what they thought was a “flight to safety”… I’m sure they exited with some red in the numbers… They basically gave the Gov’t a loan, paid the Gov’t for that loan, and lost money… Great “flight to safety” I’d say… NOT! Safe Haven? What Safe Haven?…

There’s no information right now about what games the Gov’t played in these figures… I think that for now though we can believe in our heart of hearts that they are playing games, which means the question at heart is… When the Fed winds down their buying of Treasuries, what happens to yields… And in turn what happens to borrowing costs… And finally the economy. My opinion? It won’t be pretty… But neither will the monetizing of debt that the Fed keeps performing… So, it’s a case of pick your poison… I would prefer the quantitative easing / monetizing of debt to stop, and let’s take our lumps on the economy that the Gov’t has been so hell-bent in attempting to stop… Get it over with, and live to see another day, rather than prolonging all this bad stuff…

For instance, last week, I read an article that talked about how the Big Banks are still in trouble… That just stinks! See what I’m talking about here? If they had been told to close their doors a year ago, we would be probably be pulling our selves out from that mess now… But nooooooooo! Instead the Gov’t spent hundreds of Billions of dollars to prop them up, and a year later, they still have problems! That just stinks!

So far this year, and I know, these aren’t the Big Banks, but ones that have caused significant damage to the funds of the FDIC, there has been 77 banks close… 77 Banks folks! One of the banks that closed was sold to another bank, but with the Gov’t guaranteeing that the buying bank didn’t experience any losses… Well, that would be a big wouldn’t it? If the closed bank didn’t have losses, it wouldn’t be getting closed! My friend and excellent writer, David Galland, had this to say about these back door deals for closed banks…

“Note that bit about the government “agreeing to shield acquirers from certain losses on assets of the failed bank.” This sort of guarantee has become a popular backdoor way for the government to deal with various elements of this crisis, without the more overt method of writing a check to cover losses or, heavens forbid, actually letting the equity holders bear the brunt for having made a bad investment in a poorly run bank.

Instead, the government jiggers things to hand off the good assets of a bad bank to one of their buddies, while agreeing to shift the liability for the poor assets onto the backs of taxpayers – with the IOU due and payable at some point down the road.”

OK… Back to me… I would not want to go on from that last note without mentioning that EverBank who sponsors this letter, and is my employer, which is not taken lightly, is enjoying a very good run of deposit growth and earnings growth. We just posted the 2nd QTR numbers, and I’ll have them to give to you, as soon as the marketing people give me the details. I understand that they are quite good, once again!

The other piece of data that printed yesterday was the NAHB Housing Market Index, which printed a digit higher than the July print of 17… So, 18 is the index number, what does that mean to us? Well, first of all, the Index represents a survey of Home Builders of Single-Family detached homes, and is comprised of three surveys… 1. Present Sales 2. 6-month expectations 3. traffic of buyers. The index has a range between 1 and 100, with 1 being bad, and 100 being excellent… A figure above 50, suggests that survey participants are seeing good economic conditions for Home Sales.

So… Now that we’ve learned that in class today, who can tell me what an index reading of 18 represents? You, over there in the corner, please take the IPOD ear-phones out of your ears and answer the question! Yes… It means we have a LOOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGG time to go before we get back to 50…

Today we’ll see Housing Starts data for July… And Building Permits for July… These too will probably show a small uptick in activity, but nothing close to what it should be. And… Let’s also keep in mind that the problem we have with Housing in this country is that we have a GLUT of inventory, and it continues to grow, given the record number of foreclosures that I talked about last week… So, what good does it do to have these two pieces of data print strong? Sure, somehow the builders are finding the money to keep building and employing people, but, I just don’t see why that’s a good thing overall… Given… The glut of inventory.

I just wanted to recap what we’ve seen in the past week… A very weak Retail Sales figure, that was supposed to be inflated with the Cars for Clunkers program sales, and was not! And we saw a huge drop in Consumer Confidence… No wonder stocks have taken it on the chin the last two trading days… And… You have to wonder where all those economists are now that claimed last week that the recession had ended! Ended? Over? It’s not over until we say it’s over!

Speaking of foreclosures… I would have to think that these days, these days I sit and think about all the things that I forgot to do, for you… No wait! I have no idea where that came from, well actually I do know who sang it, but I mean that I would just start typing that! UGH! Runaway fat fingers! Any way… I do think that these days, all those unemployed people that were losing their jobs all winter and spring are now having problems… That’s a sad thing, folks… Something that might have been at least delayed with savings… But, recall back to before this financial crisis began, savings rates in the U.S. had gone negative! That’s sad too… But has been turned around now that everyone sees how important it is to have a war chest of savings… Let’s hope we don’t ever get to the negative savings rate again!

At home, I use ATT-U-Verse which means my news when I log on, comes from YAHOO! Last night I logged in, and saw this on the front page of news items… So… I just had to click into it to see what it was all about…

“A USA TODAY/Gallup poll found that 57% of Americans think President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus either had no impact on the recession or made it worse, while 41% said the spending was good for the economy. More than three-quarters said they are “somewhat worried” or “very worried” that some of the stimulus money is being wasted.”

Hmmm…. Maybe there are more Pfennig readers out there than I imagined! Now, we need to make the other 41% see the error of their thinking, and get them to diversify a portion of their investment portfolio out of the dollar, and into the asset classes of currencies and metals!

And with that note… I think I’ll head to the Big Finish! No wait! I wanted to mention that the threat of hurricanes in the Gulf have pushed the price of Oil higher, and will continue to have an affect on Black Gold’s price!

Currencies today 8/18/09: A$ .8240, kiwi .6710, C$ .9050, euro 1.4120, sterling 1.6560, Swiss .9280, rand 8.05, krone 6.1410, SEK 7.26, forint 193.10, zloty 2.9525, koruna 18.14, yen 95, sing 1.45, HKD 7.7515, INR 48.75, China 6.8338, pesos 12.94, BRL 1.88, dollar index 79.18, Oil $67.75, 10-yr 3.50%, Silver $14.08, and Gold… $938

That’s it for today… My little buddy, Alex, has his first day of school today… He’s in the 8th grade this year… My, time has flown since he was just starting school! When I was a kid, we didn’t start school until after Labor Day… I remind him and my two other children that are both teachers, of that whenever August rolls around! My beloved Cardinals won a big game last night in Los Angeles… Of course I’m in bed sleeping by the time the 1st pitch is thrown! Keep it going, Cardinals… Just keep it going… I’m very glad that I was able to get in to a good orthopedic doctor and get that shot as quickly as I did… I wonder how long I would have had to wait, no… Never mind I’m not going there! It’s time to hit send… So… Let’s get going on that Terrific Tuesday!

Source: German Investor Confidence Soars!

The death of the conservative columnist and showman William F. Buckley, Jr. – whom Fox News called “the icon of the American conservative movement” – and they would know for Fox News was part of his regressive legacy – reminds us what a sorry state the conservative movement is in America.

Buckley’s exit provided occasion to recall when he long enjoyed the pulpit of a weekly public television show, Firing Line – a medium richly suited to a man who was chiefly a performer. Buckley was basically a showman, far more Phineas Taylor Barnum than Edmund Burke, and that seems to be largely overlooked on the occasion of his death. The faithful were besotted, his disciples transfixed. The panygerics, loony and laudatory, saluted him for founding the National Review, which we are told rallied American conservatives and led to a brighter day.

But Buckley was at heart an early opponent of civil rights, no fan of  “queers,” as he called them, and a “crypto-Nazi” (in the estimation of Gore Vidal) but we’ll come back to that. He was an enthusiast of the American monster Joe McCarthy. Naturally, no encomium failed to mention his devotion to the Roman Catholic Church.

But at his core, his center, Buckley was a fake of the first order. Pure and simple. A sideshow act cooked up at a time when the rising medium of television needed such variety. Everything about Buckley was calculated, a performance, from the logorrhea aimed at sending the gaping rustics, as Mencken called them, to Roget and Webster. His speech, so affected as to be almost self-caricature, was one of his trademarks in an act perfected over decades. The lizard tongue lolling, the eyebrows arching hither and yon, the louche slouch. The popular historian Theodore S. White was reminded of Oscar Wilde when he saw Buckley in action (and he was a fan, too), reminding that among other things part of the show was a dubious sexuality.

Slate magazine, quoting various authorities on the Mother Tongue, noted that his accent was completely false and that none of his kinsmen spoke this way. It was – like so much of Buckley – a calculated and practiced affectation designed to dazzle the rube.

When he came on the scene in the 1950s, the conservative in America was not far removed from the swamp and the lynch mob. Fire-breathing Christians roamed the land. The earth was, indeed, flat. Here be dragons. Buckley made the yahoo and the simpleton swell with pride. Half a century later the conservative movement is back where it started.

When the novelist Gore Vidal branded him a “crypto-Nazi” on national television Buckley flipped out. Vidal had obviously hit a nerve. Buckley was so enraged that at one point he shouted on air, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.”

Buckley loved the sucker punch. He was a bully. There was a streak of snooty meanness in the man that was little concealed. He lured poor drunken Jack Kerouac on his show in the final year of his life and ridiculed him – an easy laugh and nothing to be proud of. But Kerouac now belongs to the ages, his most famous novel, On The Road, a classic. What did Buckley leave that is timeless? (His performance art may have appeal much in the way that cultists watch Lucille Ball or “The Honeymooners.”) Buckley did not fare so well in debate with genuine intellectuals of the first order when he was more fairly matched. The linguist Noam Chomsky handled Buckley so deftly that Buckley also suggested that Chomsky needed a punch in the mouth.

The conservative kingdom of this world that Buckley dreamed of is now largely the bullying of radio talk show windbags like the Rush Limbaugh or the cruel harridan Ann Coulter, the nasty braying of Bill O’Reilly or the preposterous Tucker Carlson, a fourth-rate Buckley impersonator, replete with bowtie. Talk show nits denouncing global warming and Darwin.

Yes, the earth is still flat. Quite a legacy.

Surely this was not what Buckley was hoping for when he wrote God and Man at Yale?  He must have had some painful moments in his final years looking at what had dragged itself out of the La Brea tar pit.

The ululations, to use a Buckleyism, on his passing credit him with begetting Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan (as if that were something to boast about), but they stopped at any connection with the current jackpot the Republic finds itself in. As for Buckley’s legacy, what legacy might that be? He left the stage with the country’s economy in a shambles. Our money worthless. The United States is loathed around the globe. And a genuine boob is sitting in the ruins of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This was the conservative’s dream? Buckley departed this vale with the nation embroiled in a hopeless, winless war that has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Americans and wounded some 29,000 others. I should doubt that many of them were readers of National Review.