Forget the "Great Depression." Worldwide the leftists are setting the stage for a "Greater Depression."

World Outlook
Greek communists now call the German's Nazis and think they deserve more reparations for their invasion three generations ago. In the USA states like California and New York get extra "stimulation" money to offset deficits by quietly paying off teacher and state employee unions for political support of communists, socialists, and other leftists. Obama said he wanted a "revolutionary" guard to act as a new domestic army. Thug organizations such as Acorn are a vehicle to meet his goal. Europe has also been using stimulus funds for leftists and that only raises the specter of a "Greater Depression"

Argentine still has $20 billion (and growing) of defaulted bonds.

Derivative traders are signaling that the Euro’s slump to a nine-month low will continue even if European leaders bail out Greece. Most major Greek banks there have now been downgraded. Leftist Greek unions run by angry, ignorant and stupid people just struck today and paralyzed the Greek economy and tourism.

Mexico will Buy Up to $600 Million a Month as Mexico’s central bank buys as much as $600 million a month in the currency market in a push to boost foreign reserves after last year’s peso tumble led policy makers to turn to the International Monetary Fund for help.

It is becoming evident that EU nations are hiding much of their national debt with transactions that keep the debt off the books. Goldman helped Greece and others hide $billions of debt thereby hiding their high risk and putting them well over their heads and unable to pay fair market interest on their existing debt now that it has been disclosed. Interest payments on new debt have become unaffordable and any country that offers Greece aid will lose everything they loan. Greece arranged swap agreements with about 15 securities firms that have helped hide the country’s true deficit. It now appears that European economies are beginning to slump again because socialist spending programs do not work they only deepen the crisis by increasing the debt burden, which is the cause, not the cure for recessions. Leftists are so stupid they think the cause of economic ruin is what leads to great wealth. They max out their credit cards and then want to mug the rest of us because we work hard and save in order to create real wealth.

Greece is smaller than California or New York where government employees are also sucking the blood out of their taxpayers. But the ignorant American leftists used their $800billion stimulation package to protect and stimulate more government job creation while raising taxes on productive people. Is that stupidity or what?


Week of Market Reports:

Housing Prices rose 3.1% indicating further stabilization.
Consumer Confidence "early estimate" declined to 46% from 56.5%. That seems like a fluke.
Commercial property sales increased 70% in December indicating that commercial real estate may not be as fragile as thought.

Yesterday
New Home Sales fell 11% to 309K from last month's unrevised 342K level. But that is not bad considering that we saw housing prices reported yesterday as up 3.1% and the federal $9000 tax incentive for first time home buyers ended last month. Besides new homes only add to the housing inventory. Existing home sales are a better indicator this Friday.
Ben Bernanke said US interest rates would remain low for several more months to lower the risk of a double dip recession as stimulus plans are phased out. About one third of existing stimulation never was spent.

Thursday, Feb. 25:
Unemployment Claims
Durable Goods Orders
Leading Economic Indices

Friday, Feb. 26:
GDP Revision
Chicago PM Index
Consumer Sentiment
Existing Home Sales 10am

Market Outlook February 25
The markets rose yesterday on low volume. The short and interim market direction remains bullish. However, when the market rises close to the next high (in 2 to 4 months) it will likely be a critical time to take profits because FED tightening will likely be occurring soon after. Inflation has started and health care costs surge and care declines whenever socialists get involved. After the next high point the subsequent decline will likely break the old October 30 lows and challenge even the July 2009 low. Our corrected NYSE cash flow index gave its Head & Shoulder neck breakdown sell signal on Jan 29 when the NYSE (corrected for trading volume) broke through the neckline of a head and shoulders formation and it plunged about 3% below. But that signal has a long lead time which allows us to know what is likely two or three months in advance. The reason we cannot do a Market Cash Flow Analysis (MCFA) of the other exchanges is because they use the NYSE volume; they no longer use their own real stock volume.

Asian markets were down over night; Shanghai up 1.3% again, Hong Kong down -0.3%, India unchanged, and Japan down -1%.

European markets are down in the range from -0.1% to -0.4% this morning about half way through their day.

Today US pre-market futures are up about 0.6% at 8:00 AM EST. It is seldom a good indicator of what will happen but we are due for a resumption of the up-trend soon. It is anticipated that bank failures will be up this year from last year even with low bank borrowing rates.