China Lifts Inflation Controls; Awful Year for India Rupee; 30-year Mortgage Rates Hit Record Low; First Recorded Decline in Online Holiday Shopping; UBS Offloads Bank of China Stake

At an Oxford Club chapter meeting in Asheville, NC last summer, an attendee asked me what I thought about Wall Street’s much-ballyhooed “structured products.” My answer was brief. “Not much.”

I saw a report on the IFO’s correlation with the euro’s past moves to higher ground… Made sense to me, as strong IFO reports came out right before the euro moved past previous big figures…

General Electric’s big miss has the market spooked. But it says more about the credit crunch than global slowdown fears.
Inflated housing prices are a Western phenomenon. That includes Europe. With the dollar down and out, the euro could be next. Meanwhile, Asian currencies are soaring…