Give Me Just a Little More Time

Delay to the Stress Test results! Who could have thought the 8 weeks they’ve had wasn’t enough time to work out how to disclose the results. To be fair, it seems like they’ve been making it up as they go along so maybe it was thought that would be the easy part. The worry is that the weaker ones will get a pasting…so I guess they’ll have to dress up the results somehow and try to buy a bit more time.
Maybe it was this story, or maybe just that we were almost flat on the year in the SPX and encountering resistance but the market gave back its gains after Europe went home. Understandable enough really as we have month end, a long weekend and the old ‘sell in May and go away” adage in peoples’ minds. Now while the folks on Bloomberg and CNBC (more the former) are surely government sponsored cheerleaders for the market, they’ve mentioned “sell in May and go away” so many times that even if only by investor osmosis, they may be conspiring to scupper their own plan.
Putting on my paranoid hat for a moment, there was an email posted on the web yesterday from a Dr. Marcus Gitterle, an emergency medicine physician based out of Texas, which caused a lot of consternation with officials. The topic: Swine Flu. The basic tenet: this thing is far more serious and prevalent than we’re being told.

Now, given that the markets have summarily dismissed all other bad news over the past 2 months, I thought it’s not too great a stretch of the imagination for them to do the same with Pig Flu. In reading a bit about this, and all the comparisons to SARS and how that didn’t cause a big an issue for the world economy I found an interesting article from the Telegraph.

SARS is/was a coronovirus. Don’t ask me what this is, but it's far less contagious than Swine Flu which is an Influenza Virus. Anyway, have a read of the article, essentially, pandemic or no pandemic; comparisons with SARS are apples and oranges. This is far harder to contain and could provide a further shock to the global economy.

See the rise in cases of Swine Flu on this chart…mind you if you look close enough, I’m pretty sure the rate of change of the slope seems to be slowing…gotta love that green shoot 2nd derivative!