The Weekend Wrap-up 5.21.11

My apologies for the delay, things have been pretty hectic here with it being the rapture and all so today's recap will be a little shorter than last week's.

Nevertheless, I have a cool clip for you to check out so without further ado, here's the Weekend wrap up, rapture edition.

Americas:

• It’s been quite a mixed week in the US with the general risk off atmosphere yielding to momentary bouts of bullishness. This reflects the equally mixed data we have; while low gas prices, an upward hiring trend, lower jobless claims, reports of lending increases and lower mortgage rates are definitely good, they’re trumped by lower home sales, weaker Philly and Empire surveys, the debt ceiling getting reached, and weak outlooks from retail. All this eventually dragged the Dow and the S&P down for the third straight week.

• While the dollar is enjoying the Euro’s death spiral, it’s been weak against the other European crosses and it’s especially pressured by the commodity currencies.

• Meanwhile, Canada and Mexico have been putting up positive numbers.

Europe:

• Ahhh, the EU, what would I do without you? Watching what’s going on there has become a favorite pastime of mine; it’s sort of a telenovela, sans the hot Latinas. The new twist in the plot is the coming Spanish elections, where a loss for the ruling socialist party could see the entire country into deeper ruin. Why? Because a new government might reassess debt calculations, exactly what happened in Cataluña where the new guard did and, after seeing a few misplaced figures in their books, revised the deficit to more than double. Increíble. Spreads have widened now with 2 year yields up 30 basis points and 10 years are now testing their multi-month ranges.

• Meanwhile, in the Greek isles… They're still fucked. While a Portuguese bailout has already been packaged and Hellenic notes have theoretically hit 24% yields, the EU is still in discussions as to what to do with them.

• Elsewhere though things are looking better, figures from Nordic and Germanic Europe showed that things are on the up, even Italy showed signs of life.

• European equity markets ended the week on a positive note, up for the third straight session thanks to a low dollar and Ben Lightyear. The FTSE was up 0.70% while the DAX, the CAC, and the IBEX were up 0.30%, 0.40%, and 0.30% respectively.

Asia:

• Japan is officially in recession with their economy shrinking 0.9% for Q1. The BOJ left rates between 0% to 0.10% as expected and are reported to be under no pressure to further easing given their current predicament. Honestly it really sucks to be them now; sentiment is at a low and with the uncertainties of QE2 and a stronger Yen added, a recovery won’t be happening anytime soon. The Nikkei ended the week down 0.1%.

• Data from Taiwan came out lower than expected, Taiex down 0.5%.

• News says that the bottom might drop on the HK housing market if mortgage rates jump 2% this year.

• Asian indices ended mostly up for the week despite having mixed trading throughout. The Hang Seng ended the week up 0.1%, the Kospi up 0.5%, the Shanghai Composite up 0.1%, while Australia’s ASX was down 0.4%.

Here's my clip of the week:

Any of you monkeys seen this movie? I'm a huge horror fan so I'm putting this on my must watch list.