Sunday, April 5, 2009

Signs of Economic Spring

This is from a few weeks back. I misplaced my note to post this. I’ll link directly, since you probably already tossed the paper.

In the March 14 issue of The Wall Street Journal was a piece entitled “Signs of Stability Drive Up Stocks”.

I don’t care about stocks in this class. What I do care about is data indicating that we aren’t in free fall any more. Most of what I’m interested in is towards the end of the article and in the chart.

There it shows that futures prices for copper are up. This trend has continued over the last 3 weeks. Copper can be stored (which tends to take prices of other metals out of cycle with the rest of the economy), but we use so much of it that this can get really expensive, and it ends up tracking the economy pretty well.

It also shows the Baltic Dry Index – essentially a price for shipping containers by ship - going up, although it has faltered since then.

No comments:

Post a Comment