Gold

The June Consumer Price Index was reported out today and fell in line with expectations at 0.3%. This caused the true believers in a September Federal Reserve interest-rate hike to break out the dance records and party hats.

But just hold on a minute and let’s look at the overall data for the first half of 2015.

Gold is stumbling around right now, having fallen victim to a rising U.S. dollar today, which is more than counteracting a slight rise in regular trading. Silver is faring a little worse and palladium is taking a shellacking, down about 1.7% on the session.

Those four topics sum up today’s trading currents. Let’s start with the most intractable and the one that is most immediately able to endanger the world economy: Greece.

As the dust begins to settle on the Euro-Greek tragicomedy and on the first phase of an Iran nuclear-bomb-prevention deal, we are back to some extent to business as usual.

We haven’t had a full day to thoroughly analyze the “A-Greek-ment,” although at first glance there seem to be some messy details not fully buttoned up. As the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages said when things were going well, “God is in the details.” When the cathedral fell down, they would say, “The devil is in the details.”

It seems as if for the moment China’s central-planning moves to bolster its main stock exchanges are paying off. Yesterday and today combined, the Shanghai Index was up almost 12%. Beware, though.

Apparently the world didn’t end when the NYSE stopped trading for four hours yesterday. Today, China’s Shanghai index moved higher, recovering by almost 6%. Greece is Greece and we shall see what happens, but the crisis, such as it is, is declining in influence.

Amidst the hubbub of the New York Stock Exchange technical outage, it’s easy to neglect the fundamental problems afflicting the world’s economy.

Less than robust economic health in the United States is nevertheless pulling the world train along. It has to by default.

Liquidity is a key issue in all major economic regions, although for very different reasons.

Today has been a trying and troubling day in world markets as everyone awaits the next move in the European-Greek drama. We’re hard-pressed to see how it can turn out well for anyone with any exposure to Greece’s debt.