Notes From All Over -- Beware The End-Of-Day Reality Check -- Housing Starts Surge -- December 16, 2021

Housing:

• housing starts: up 11.8% vs 2.86 forecast
• building permits: 3.6% vs 0.6% forecast
• SO, what was different; how did analysts get this so wrong? One word: weather. 
• an incredibly warm fall, warm November, and December looks just as warm
  

Lee Cooperman: great interview on CNBC this morning. 

First group "financial / economic" indicators:

• 10-Year Treasury: link here. 1.472%.
  
• DXY: link here. 96.03.
  
• Silver: link  here. $22.235.
• CBOE volatility index: link here. Explained at Investopedia. 18.65. Down 3.32%.
  

Story of the day: the market. Until it's not. 

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

Fed talk:

• the biggest misreading yesterday by "talking heads": focus on "bottom lines" and ignoring the entire Jay Powell text
• Jim Cramer got it exactly right
• best CNBC hour: 8:00 - 9:00 a.m. CT (the full hour) and then again, 5:00 - 5:15 p.m. CT (a quarter hour)
• remember: two more FOMC meetings where Fed is still buying assets, though at a declining rate; but still buying assets and not raising rates which now stand at 0 percent;
  

Fed "balance sheet":

• 2021, end, current: $8 trillion -- Fed moves glacially to increase the taper but will still be buying assets through March, 2022
• 2020: $4 trillion -- year of the plague
• 2019: $1 trillion -- prior to Covid-19

Cramer:

• distribution inflation not commodity inflation

Covid-19:

• Austria, the poster child in Europe for Omicron: the surge is over, and cases plummeting; link here.
• US: double-peak surge; link here.
• California: yeah, whatever; link here.
• one of our extended family members finally left California this past year
• cited reason: the mask mandates
• the other reason: cost of living
• to where did they move? east Tennessee
  

Fertilizer: US has six months to "work this."

Re-posting: 

Story of the day:

Harold Hamm to donate $50 million to jump-start Energy Institute in Oklahoma. Bloomberg. Campus: Oklahoma State.

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From the Archives: Ten Years Ago