I'm not a trader, and I don't put much faith in short term charts the likes of which you typically see in financial porn. Longer term charts, however, are more interesting. It is much easier to separate the signal (or trend) from the noise, and the "trend" is a reflection of the economic psychology of the public. Not just that part of the public that invests, but the public who buys houses and has mortgages, buys cars and retail and pays on credit, or even saves in CDs and money market accounts. In short, just about everybody.

Like many people, I loathe the idea of a housing "bailout" for the greedy, the reckless, and the spendthrift. Certainly those bankers and borrowers had no problem "privatising their gains" in the early part of this decade. I see no reason why they should look to the prudent and the thrifty now, especially when so many millions of those prudent and thrifty are those whose own dreams of owning a home of their own at a reasonable price were frozen out by the housing mania.
But out of crisis comes opportunity. In this case, the opportunity for the Democratic party to show average Americans what a Democratic majority would do for them and their financial well-being. The opportunity to earn their trust and their votes for years to come. To show that a party that believes in governance for the average citizen can separate the wolves from the sheep, penalizing the former and acting with basic humanity to the latter.

One of the things I wanted to try here is to post bits of significant economic data that would scroll off the page on the great orange satan in about 10 minutes. One of those items was yesterday's retail sales number. For about the last 6 months, most economic data has been deteriorating steadily, but two of the holdouts were retail sales and jobs data. A couple of weeks ago the December nonfarm payroll number finally went negative.