Bad Banks Back, Stocks Slump, Dollar Grows

  • August 14, 2009
  • David Goodboy

Word that over 150 publicly traded banks may have more than five percent of bad loans rocked the stock market lower today. Five percent is considered the limit for an institution to remain solvent. Stocks have soared higher over the last 4 weeks hence some of today’s decline can be attributed to nervous investors taking profits before the weekend. The U.S. Dollar was a beneficiary of the negative equity sentiment growing nicely against the Euro during New York trade. Despite the hard core pessimism, stocks managed to bounce near the close, ending the session well off the lows. The DJIA ended the day down -76.79 to 9321.40, the Nasdaq gave up -23.83 to 1985.52 and the broad based S&P 500 dropped -8.64 to 1004.09.

Barnes & Noble
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Coinstar
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Nordstrom
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Volkswagen
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Oil dropped $3.01 to $67.65, gold gave back $7.80 to $948.70 and surprisingly the fear index VIX gave back 1.78% to 24.27 after being much higher intraday.

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Market Snapshot

Dow

 -76.79 9321.40

NASDAQ

 -23.83 1985.52

S&P 500

 -8.64 1004.09

Economic
News

Productivity-Prel (Q2): Consensus: 5.4%, Prior: 1.6%

Unit Labor Costs (Q2): Consensus: -2.4%, Prior: 3.0%

Wholesale Inventories (Jun): Consensus: -0.9%, Prior: -0.8%

Trade Balance (Jun): Consensus: -$28.5B, Prior: $26.0B

Crude Inventories (08/07): Consensus: NA, Prior: +1.67M

Treasury Budget (Jul): Consensus: -$180.0B, Prior: NA

FOMC Rate Decision: Consensus: NA, Prior: 0.00%-0.25%

Export Prices ex-ag. (Jul): Consensus: NA, Prior: 0.8%

Import Prices ex-oil (Jul): Consensus: NA, Prior: 0.2%

Initial Claims (08/08): Consensus: 545K, Prior: 550K

Retain Sales (Jul): Consensus: 0.7%, Prior: 0.6%

Retail Sales ex-auto (Jul): Consensus: 0.1%, Prior: 0.3%

Business Inventories (Jun): Consensus: -0.9%, Prior: -1.0%

Core CPI (Jul): Consensus: 0.1%, Prior: 0.2%

CPI (Jul): Consensus: 0.0%, Prior: 0.7%

Capacity Utilization (Jul): Consensus: 68.4%, Prior: 68.0%

Industrial Production (Jul): Consensus: 0.4%, Prior: -0.4%

Mich Sentiment-Prel (Aug): Consensus: 69.0, Prior: 66.0

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