People Are Bored

For one thing, headlines out of Washington are dominating the discussion, and that's unfortunate.

Trading ranges have been very narrow.

Traders have been talking about giant asteroids more than anything else.

We might be looking at what a post-crisis environment might be like. Modest moves. Few notable headlines. Boredom.

In his morning note, SocGen's Kit Juckes tries to fight through the boredom, and come up with a few datapoints that he puts together to help reveal what's really going on.

The title of his note is: Patience... I need patience...

The FT headline is that US oil imports are tumbling. the consumer credit data show credit demand is up, which is either bad (debt super-cycle alive and well) or good (animal spirits alive and well). But ALL the data suggest (to me, anyway) that the drag on Q1 activity in the US will be less than folks expect and that as that feeds through, we will see continued 'risk on' behavior through Q1.

...

Recent European data have pointed to a soft Q4 and a rebound of sorts in Q1. James Nixon concludes in this morning's Economics piece, that the ECB is on hold for the foreseeable future. At the margin, improving sentiment about Q1 should underpin the Euro, and with peripheral spreads tighter, our models continue to show that the Euro is 1) higher than it should be and 2) facing no pressure to correct downwards.

It's nothing major, but at the margins things keep getting better. European data hasn't been that horrible. US is hanging in better than people might have expected, especially given the confidence shocks.

Mostly though, people are waiting for something to happen.