I think you're seeing some movement on the retail sales and oil, but I don't think it's meaningful. I still think this market will grudgingly go up.

This raises the risk that we could turn over into a consumer-led recession sometime next year.

I've been reasonably optimistic that we can get back to high single-digit growth in the stock market by year's end. Valuations are such at this point that I don't really see a lot of downside risk.

One-third of the widening of the deficit is the oil bill, and aircraft sales explains most of the rest. It's a little superficial.

For Indonesia to continue to develop its oil and gas resources and to step back into the role of a true net exporting country and replace their position in OPEC this is a pretty important deal for them to close.

This is a very positive, strong report and encouraging because it included Katrina and a spike in oil prices and we still just seem to have a lot of momentum going into the fourth quarter.