Borrowing Trouble

Finally getting around to writing the Wednesday post at 1am. I took a stroll by the WSJ’s website to see how tomorrow is shaping up before I go to bed. Now I just want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head.

The FTSE is already off more than a percent after less than an hour of trading and the DAX is heading towards minus two. Is this a follow up to Tuesday’s US market dip at the end of trading, or maybe the surprise resignation of Japan’s prime minster, Hatoyama, is driving a bit of sentiment.

There are about ten good reasons that I can think of off the top of my head for wishing that Hatoyama had been able to make a go of it.  On the plus side, he is taking Ozawa with him. Hopefully this will give a bit of oxygen to the reformers in the DPJ and offset concerns about the negative impact to Japanese democracy.

Of course that still leaves plenty of fallout from Hatoyama’s resignation to worry about with that whole global economic downturn thing, continued Japanese deflation, and Kim Jong Il giving regional stability so much help.

Did I mention that Prudential’s acquisition of the Asian life insurance arm of AIG fell through? And you must already know from yesterday that the topkill failed to stop the oil eruption in the Gulf of Mexico and the oil is about to hit Florida.

So any way, this is a blog about change and the world is fluxing hard enough that I can’t drill down on a small bit of it for you today. I am going to have to go with a simple admonition to hold on to your hats this summer. Here’s hoping that the last two years were as wild as it gets.

Oh, and one more happy thought, try not to worry about the sovereign bond market reaction if the Torry/Lib-Dem coalition implodes in nine months like the DPJ just managed to.