Hey y ‘all, gonna be in Washington DC on Friday.
If you want to get together, and talk economic policy (inter alia), I plan to be at The Boxcar Tavern @ 9 PM tomorrow.
I don’t know anything about the place, but someone told me it was cool, so, be there.
So I dreamed about a slideshow on the internet last night.
You might think this has something to do with my work pervading my dreamlife. But I don’t really care about that. Work entering a dream is hardly novel.
What happened was, someone on the internet got angry with me, and decided to take an email correspondence that we had had, and make it public in an attempt to embarrass me. And they made it into a slideshow.
As I clicked through the slideshow in my dream, I cringed at each new slide, realizing how bad the whole thing made me look.
The really fascinating part, to me, was how I obviously had two levels of consciousness in my dream.
There was one level of consciousness that was worried at each click, anxious to see about what embarrassing fact would appear on the next slide.
And then there was the other level of consciousness, a deeper one, that was creating the content in advance.
So one part of my brain had built a slideshow of embarrassing information about myself, while the other part of my brain didn’t know what was going to be revealed on each additional slide.
The two parts of the brain only interfaced in the reality of the dream.
It seemed kind of weird that that’s possible.
Portrait by Jeremy Goldstein
Hey Washington DCers.
I’m going to be in town tonight (Monday, December 17) and tomorrow (Tuesday, December 18).
I don’t know many of you, but I’d love to hang out and talk Fiscal Policy (not monetary policy, since the Fed’s stance is currently unambiguous). You should bring your friends also.
As such, I’d like everyone in town of all political persuasions to come out and meet me at The Passenger at 8 PM Tuesday night.
The address is: 1021 7th Street, NW, Washington, D.C.
If you can’t make it then, ping me (jweisenthal@businessinsider) and may be we can hang out some other time when I’m in town.
And if there’s something cool I should do tonight let me know.
Obligatory.
Madonna’s American Pie. One of the greatest covers of all time. Happy Cover Friday!
Miley Cyrus, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” That’s when the taxi man turned on the radio and a Bob Dylan song was on.
Awesome.
“Of the devices that may be used to buttress the commitment to a new target, several—fiscal policy most obviously, but in the Fed’s case any expansion of the kinds of assets being purchased—would need legislative approval even if the target itself did not.” — Dominic Wilson, Jan Hatzius and Sven Jari Stehn
Some interesting commentary on the basically in-line data from this morning…
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Import prices declined by 0.4% in August (+13.0% y-o-y), in line with Nomura expectations, but less than consensus (-0.8%). Two volatile headline price categories, petroleum (-2.1%) and food (-0.8%), were responsible for the decline in August. Barring the effect of a lower petrol price, non-petroleum prices increased by 0.3%, bringing them to their fastest year-over-year pace (5.5%) since September 2008. Elsewhere, industrial supplies (affected by lower petrol prices) declined by 0.9%. Import prices for consumer goods excluding autos increased by 0.3% in August and were up 2.0% y-o-y. In a recent article, New York Federal Reserve Bank economists found that “U.S. import prices for consumer goods shipped from China have been rising rapidly in recent quarters—by 7 percent between 2010:Q2 and 2011:Q1”. Export prices increased by 0.5% in August with a large contribution from sharply higher food prices (+3.4%) and a rebound in industrial supplies (+0.4%). We expect producer prices, which are the next measure in the inflation pipeline, to increase by 0.5% in August with core PPI increasing by 0.4%.
This morning, Goldman put out these three currency trades
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The following trading ideas from the Global Markets Group reflect shorter-term views, which may differ from the longer-term ‘structural’ positions included in our ‘Top Trades’ list further below.
In FX:
1) Close long EUR/TRY, opened at 2.1620 on 9 February 2011, after closing below the trailing stop for a potential return of 9%.
2) Stay long EUR/$, opened at 1.4085 on 18 March 2011, with a target of 1.50 and a stop on a close below 1.35, now at 1.3611.
3) Stay short USD against a basket of NZD, RUB, SEK, KRW, MYR and CLP, opened at 100 on 10 August 2011, with a target of 105 and a stop on a close below 98, now at 98.3.
