Europe

Not interfering with the market’s adjustment process is simply allowing Schumpeterian “creative destruction” to operate, and cleanse the forest. But that process is anathema to well-compensated entrenched interests that suckle from the teat of the State. Banks, for example.

Captain Schettino will probably never be asked to take command of another cruise ship. But Captain Bernanke and his crew are still at the controls of the US economy. Apparently, they still have no idea where they are…or where they are going.

Mario Draghi, new ECB boss who completed his monetary apprenticeship at Goldman Sachs, has conjured up a sneaky way to print money while giving the impression he’s doing nothing of the sort.

The Americans are trying to discredit the euro in order to perpetuate dollar hegemony, so goes the argument. Hmm. It’s possible. It’s also possible that all central bankers and monetary policy makers are singing from the same hymnal. Their answer to the end of the credit bubble is to try and pump it back up with currency debasement. In that case, this is a war of all against all.

On Friday, after the close of business in the stock market, S&P downgraded 9 European countries. Spain and Italy were both taken down another notch, leaving Italy with a BBB+ rating and Spain with an A. But the headline damage was done to France, whose triple-A rating got downgraded to AA+.

“It won’t be long before the EFSF has its own credit rating cut,” we wrote yesterday. And it wasn’t! Standard and Poor’s delivered the coup de grace yesterday. It downgraded the European Financial Stability Facility from AAA to AA+.

The oil and energy alliance between China and Saudi has just been strengthened. On Saturday – in the wake of Europe’s debt crisis – Saudi state oil company Aramco signed a deal with China’s Sinopec to build an oil refinery in the Red Sea city of Yanbu.

Investors would have done well to go fishing yesterday. The markets were flat as a mill pond, ending the session more or less where they began.