Five Stock
Market Changers to Watch This Week
Featured Story: Flash
Crash Still a Mystery to Regulators
- Consumer pulse: Retail
sales figures come out Tuesday pre-market (8:30 a.m.) and the
closely watched Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index is released Friday
morning (9:55 a.m.). A declining consumer sentiment figure is
considered an early signal of a coming downturn in the economy.
- Inflation/deflation watch:
How much we might be paying for things in the future is reflected in
the Producer Price Index (Thursday 8:30 a.m.), a measure of consumer
goods and capital equipment early in the production process. How
much we just paid shows up in the Consumer Price Index (Friday 8:30
a.m.). Watch the food inflation breakout, say the experts, for its
effect on commodity prices, including gold and other metals.
- Factory output:
Industrial production (9:15 a.m. Wednesday) got a bit of a pop
recently on longer hours at the nation’s auto factories. As the U.S.
jobless rates grind higher, it might be up to exporters to keep
American factories humming, an open question if the dollar holds its
ground against cheaper foreign currencies.
- Debt questions: On
Thursday (9 a.m.), Treasury will release capital flows (TIC) data,
including data on foreign holders of U.S. Treasuries. China has
stepped up purchase of other countries’ debt. Will Uncle Sam stay on
the Beijing’s “buy” list?
- Major earnings: Best
Buy, Cracker Barrel, Kroger, Pall Corp. (Tuesday), Zale, Clarcor,
Dress Barn (Wednesday), Discover Financial, FedEx, Pier 1 Imports,
Herman Miller, Oracle, Research in Motion (Thursday).
Next Week: Federal
Reserve meets on Tuesday, Sept. 21 with news on interest rates by
2:15 p.m.
Flash Crash Still a Mystery to Regulators
Regulators probing the stock market "flash crash" last May still have
not uncovered a single cause but will point to "stub quotes" and other
previously identified issues as having exacerbated the market's dramatic
drop, according to two sources familiar with the probe.
A third source said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is
still asking about a "smoking gun" that might explain the May 6 crash,
when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged some 700 points before
sharply recovering, all in about 20 minutes.
The
Devaluation of the Dollar Is a Done Deal
When the market crashed more than 18 months ago, the dollar
strengthened significantly. Investors worldwide fled to the
greenback. Hundreds of billions of poured into the United
States.
But all that ended quickly when Barack Obama took office.
Once Obama and congressional Democrats began handing out
trillions of dollars in bailouts and posting record deficits,
the confidence of world investors was badly shaken. The value of
the U.S. dollar began plunging.
Since taking office, the Obama administration has increased
the monetary base by a staggering $10 trillion. In less than a
year, it managed to DOUBLE the expected annual budget deficit to
almost $2 trillion.
The result was predictable: The stock market rallied . . .
but the once mighty dollar has PLUNGED against foreign
currencies. Now inflation is about to wipe out the stock market
gains of recent months.
Click here to find out how you can protect yourself from Obama’s
plan that could result in your wealth being wiped out your
wealth.
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"Quote stuffing," in which large numbers of rapid-fire stock
orders are placed and canceled almost immediately, will not be
fingered as one of the causes of the crash, sources have said.
But the SEC is increasingly probing market data from other
trading days, looking for possible problems with what are
sometimes excessive numbers of buy and sell orders, said the
third source. The worry is that such a flood of orders could
clog data feeds and confuse investors, giving the sender an
unfair advantage to arbitrage between marketplaces.
Quote stuffing, a new term describing this possibly illegal
trading practice, differs from stub quotes, which are orders
placed well off the market prices for stocks.
Regulators are soon due to issue a follow-up report on the
crash, which rattled investors worldwide and exposed flaws in
the high-speed electronic marketplace.
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So far, the report by market regulators does not contain a lot of new
information and is expected to repeat earlier findings that a
numbernumber of events caused the crash, two sources said. The sources
requested anonymity because regulators are still collecting data and
finalizing the report.
The sources said the report will point to stub quotes as one of the
structural issues that contributed to the plunge.
The SEC has already adopted a pilot program to help prevent a repeat
of the crash. That circuit-breaker program pauses trading in a single
stock when that stock is in crisis, and has tripped several times since
it started in June.
The SEC also wants to ban stub quotes and is expected to propose such
a rule in the near future.
For months, the SEC and other market regulators have grappled with
half a dozen working hypotheses to explain the flash crash. They have
probed links between declines in prices of stock index products and the
severe mismatch in liquidity, among other things.
Although regulators still cannot explain what went wrong, they are
considering new rules to solve problems exposed by the flash crash.
In addition to the single-stock circuit breakers and stub quote ban,
the SEC wants to tighten rules for marketmakers to ensure liquidity
during stressful times.
The SEC is also mulling updates to its broader circuit breakers to
give markets a brief reprieve should they plunge uncontrollably. Current
marketwide circuit breakers were not triggered during the May crash.
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