I spent the day working and refilling the idea jar.

The video of the day is from Bloomberg where “European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and central bank governors Hamad Saud al-Sayari of Saudi Arabia and Abdullah Bin Saud al-Thani of Qatar talk about the dollar, prospects for Gulf currency revaluations and yesterday’s coordinated central bank actions to curb rising money-market rates. European Central Bank council member and Bundesbank President Axel Weber moderates the news conference in Mainz, Germany.”

Very interesting.

Market Digest

• Active ETFs Offer New Chance to Beat Market
  (Editor: Fat chance…) The PowerShares Four — three equity funds and one bond fund — will be managed openly. Two are quant funds: PowerShares Active AlphaQ Fund, owning 50 Nasdaq stocks and Powershares Active Alpha Multi-Cap Fund, owning 50 U.S. large caps. Quant funds are essentially run by computers that trade stocks based on mathematical formulas. The third equity fund, PowerShares Active Mega-Cap Portfolio, run by managers at Invesco Institutional, will hold U.S. mega-caps. Invesco will also manage the bond fund: PowerShares Active Low Duration Portfolio. All four funds hope to beat the markets they represent.
• Relax. Our economy isn’t manic depressive
  (Editor: A walk down memory lane…) The risks are certainly greater today than they have been since the 2001 US and European recession – and for Britain the prospects seem dimmer than at any time since 1992. But is this really, as George Soros proclaimed, in an article for the Financial Times, “the worst market crisis in 60 years”? The claim is unequivocally wrong, since the 20 per cent fall in share prices and the US mortgage problem cannot remotely compare with the crises that racked the world economy in the 1970s and early 1980s, when inflation and interest rates soared to 20 per cent, stock markets plunged by 80 per cent in real terms, big banks fell like ninepins and unemployment was double or triple the present level.
• The Minsky Moment
  Many of Minsky’s colleagues regarded his “financial-instability hypothesis,” which he first developed in the nineteen-sixties, as radical, if not crackpot.