Stocks just surged over 1% off their lows on absolutely no news whatsoever. The Merkel news was minutes ago (and how is that in any way positive), the EFSF being proposed to buy bonds as proposed by Italy came out 2 hours ago (and was denied) and the JPM news is old and irrelevant... The usual ridiculous move... they are on their own from a cross-asset perspective and just touched yesterday's closing VWAP which feels very algo-exit-driven...
Apparently, this is what is moving stocks [9]. From Reuters:
European finance officials were working on urgent measures to ease financial market pressure on Spain and Italy, which are too big to bail out, as EU leaders began a summit on Thursday deeply divided over how to resolve the euro zone's debt crisis.
French President Francois Hollande said on arriving at his first full European Union summit after six weeks in office that he expected agreement on emergency steps to help euro zone partners whose borrowing costs had reached unsustainable levels.
"I have come here to get very rapid solutions to support countries in the greatest difficulty on the markets even though they have made considerable efforts to restore their public finances," Hollande told reporters.
Three EU sources said work was focused on using the euro zone's temporary EFSF rescue fund and a future permanent ESM bailout fund to buy new Spanish and Italian bonds as they were issued to underpin their bond auctions.
Only problem: it came out 3 hours ago. And Germany will refuse it if and when there is a press conference.
[10]
and relative to cross-asset class risk...
[11]
Perhaps the only real catalyst here is the fact that Brian Sack has just one more day of day trading. After that, we are all at the mercy of the Economist Ph.D. who is replacing Sack and who will make this market a truly epic joke.