By Greg Peel<\/p>\n
The Dow fell 148 points or 1.8% while the S&P fell 2.3% and the Nasdaq 2.1%.<\/p>\n
The much anticipated fourth quarter US GDP (first guess) was released last night. At negative 3.8% you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t such a bad result. Pundits were convinced a number exceeding minus 5% was on the cards. But there’s no pleasing some people, and as soon as the number flashed on screens there was a collective shrug around Wall Street and a warning that it’s the first quarter 2009 which will tell the real tale. Stocks were sold, and the last trading day in January saw a record 8.6% fall for the month – the worst in January history, ever, according to Dow Jones.<\/p>\n
Since 1950 the direction of the market in January has predicted the direction of the market for the year in about 90% of cases apparently. But we’ll ignore that.<\/p>\n
Aside from the GDP number the market was spooked by a CNBC report that Bad Bank, as a policy, had hit a “snag”. It’s not quite clear what that snag actually is, but given a lot of players on Wall Street see the Bad Bank model as some sort of panacea the news was met with a level of despair.<\/p>\n
It didn’t stop the US dollar from rallying however. In a pretty good parody of The Undead, the greenback rallied on the GDP news given the word from across the pond was that EU inflation had hit a 10-year low and unemployment a 2-year high. The Aussie was caught in the crossfire, falling one and a half cents to US$0.6371.<\/p>\n
But gold was the star, ignoring the US dollar and rallying US$20.80 to US$927.10\/oz and causing a buzz across the globe. Is US$900 now breached?<\/p>\n
Oil followed gold, rising US27c to US$41.71\/bb, while base metals were mildly weaker in London.<\/p>\n
The SPI Overnight fell 64 points.<\/p>\n
But Jeff Beck stole the night (in Sydney) at the Enmore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…but only gold as the US GDP goes backwards and Bad Bank hits a “snag”. Dow down 150.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[23,29,24,22,26],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55111"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}