Asia exploded out of the gate today! 

The Hang Seng is up 2% at 21,196, gaining 408 points on the day along with a 2% gain on the Nikkei (216 points), taking them over the 10,500 mark to 10,585 as they play catch-up to the Dow, which topped out at 10,566 last week.  The BSE keeps going higher, adding 0.6% for the day, back over 17,000 at 17,108 and the Shanghia added 0.7%, finishing the day at 3,053. 

The Hang Seng’s incredible morning gap up and 100-point follow-through, though impressive, is only a "good start" to getting that index back on the road to recovery as they had topped out at 23,000 in November and flirted with 22,500 in early January so we’ll need some sustained conviction before we get all bullish on China but, for today, we can just say "WOW" - it’s amazing how much a market can move when it’s closed!  

We’re closed as well but our pre-markets are looking strong although Europe is kind of flat-lining.  They are all upset because the 300,000 people who live in Iceland took a vote and decided they didn’t have $5.3Bn to bail out failed Icebank, which kind of leaves the EU investors, who deposited money into an internet savings account that promised 8% returns, in a bit of a lurch becuase (surprisingly, I’m sure) it turns out the bank took a lot of risks to get those returns and (even more surprisingly) THEY BLEW IT!   Even more surprisingly to European investors, 93% of the voters said: "No thank you, we will not agree to pay $17,666 per person (about $58,000 per family) to make foreign investors whole."

What I find most funny about this is that the UK and the Netherlands had the nerve to ask Icelanders to repay this money.  $5.3Bn is 1/2 of Iceland’s GDP - that would be like countries who lost money in the Lehman collapse asking US taxpayers to kick in $6.5Tn to make them whole.  What do you think our vote would be?  Sure we are numb to our own debt level but are we that numb?  Possibly so as we seem to be happily buying oil at $80 a barrel again - sending $321Bn Amercian dollars out of the country in exchange for a product we burn up and need again the next day.  I wrote about this disaster over the weekend so no need to re-hash it…