President Bush illustrated just how weak and, well, really bad he is as the nation’s leader in his 2007 SOTU address. I am not talking about the troop “surge” (maybe it should be called a surgelet, also too little too late), but about the crass political support he gave to ethanol. Ethanol? [...]

One reason central bankers, oil sheiks and chinese politburo officials should like the euro is that there is no single political will behind it to obscure or threaten its value. Whereas the US is s single country, if things go bad, they go bad. The euro block, as a collection of separate countries [...]

I have put a vertical bar here to show what has happened since I last posted this image. The index retraced about 40% of the difference between its May high and its October low, which happens to also be roughly the difference between the 38.2% and 23.6% retracement of the entire reflationary move up [...]