Wall Street's macro minds have got an empty feeling
"It feels as though summer has arrived in markets," Societe Generale's Kit Juckes writes. "That can happen, on Monday morning, and change pretty quickly but the calendar is largely empty (Euro Area balance of payments is today's highlight), the Greek crisis is taking a brief time out, Chinese equity prices are trading in a narrower range than for a while."
As the urgency of the Greek crisis pulled back and the chaos of the Chinese stock market crash became more orderly, US stock prices have roared back to near record levels.
As if nothing had happened.
This is not to say there isn't big news out there. There was a pretty violent move in the gold markets early on Monday. And it's earnings season, with banking giant Morgan Stanley and drilling giant Halliburton announcing quarterly results.
But all of this stuff lacks the crisis / emergency meeting / government intervention aspect that we'd gotten used to recently.
Even in Greece, things are moving along. The Greek government received bailout money, which it immediately used to pay off some debts to the ECB and the IMF. Meanwhile, banks re-opened after being closed for three weeks, a sign that things are somewhat returning to normal.
"After three successive Sundays spent ruminating about Greece, it felt like there was a big void in my life yesterday," Deustche Bank's Jim Reid wrote. "A very heavy England loss in the cricket deepened it."
Filling space in his client note, Reid shared a little more.
"Given that the last three Sunday evenings had been spent working, I offered my wife her choice of how we spent last night," he said. "She suggested I cook dinner and we watch "Fifty Shades of Grey". All I can say is that it was a terrible movie and that I longed for a Greece conference call to distract me. I nearly tried to invent a fake one!"
Alas, no emergency Greece conference call.
US futures are pointing modestly higher. There's no major US economic data scheduled for released today. Also, there are no Federal Reserve presidents or governors scheduled to speak on monetary policy or the economy this week.