Business

Via The Daily Bell

 

While having been gradually relegated to B-grade economic data status, today's housing starts and building permits report from the Commerce Department, painted a mixed picture, with January starts declining 2.6%, from 1.279million to 1.246 million, below expectations of a 0.1% increase, however due to the upward prior revision, today's absolute print beat expectations of 1.222 million units started (forecast range 1168k - 1320k from 77 economists). Looking inside the data, single family starts rose to 823k, while multifamily starts fell to 423k in Jan.

While typically uneventful, this morning the release of minutes from the ECB's January 18-19 meeting prompted a spike in both French and Spanish bonds, with yields dropping between 6 and 8 bps after the ECB said that “limited and temporary deviations” from the capital key “were possible and inevitable.” As Bloomberg explains, the gains in these countries are due to their larger overall outstanding debt, as deviations from capital key suggests the ECB may end up buying a more bonds from these countries.

Specifically, this is what the ECB stated::

Gold Is Undervalued Say Leading Fund Managers

China has often found itself in trouble over the past couple of decades for its attempts to replicate technology from other developed countries.  But technological advances aren't the only things being mimicked in China as the country is also littered with fake replicas of monuments from around the world including the Great Sphinx of Giza, the Sydney Opera House and the U.S. Capitol building, just to name a few.