Sunday Night Musings

First off, regardless of your religious or spiritual persuasion, we should all be saying a prayer, crossing our fingers, or otherwise thinking about our Japanese brethren as they deal with the ongoing catastrophe resulting from the recent 8.9 earthquake.  If you haven't been keeping up, I urge you to click on the link below and watch both of the videos posted by the folks at Zerohedge.com.  Video number 2 is particularly disturbing and heart wrenching.  An incredible display of mother nature at her most destructive.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/stunning-new-footage-incoming-tsunami

My heart goes out to the people of Japan.  The Tsunami effect, coupled with the destruction wrought by the earthquake, and then the follow-on disasters related to their nuclear power plants....all together, an unparalleled  catastrophe in recent times.  Just try to imagine something of this magnitude happening within 50 - 100 miles of your home.  The devastation is simply unfathomable.

In terms of the financial markets, the Bank of Japan (the equivalent of the US Fed) announced an injection of  7 trillion Yen into the Japanese Money Markets this evening (morning in Japan), in an attempt to calm the markets in the face of a 5% + drop in the Nikkei.

On the precious metals front, both gold and silver are surging this evening as the futures market open on the Globex.  Silver is currently trading at $36.39, and based on the hourly chart below, looks like it wants to make a stab at the previous highs (36.76).

Will be interesting to see what happens if/when we get into the "range".

As I said earlier this weekend...should be an interesting week!