170 hostages were taken at the Radisson Hotel in Mali. 

I know – where’s Mali?  Who cares?  Apparently, not too many of you do because the Futures have gained 0.5% since this happened early this morning, so let’s just keep going and invest as if nothing bad is ever going to happen.  

Today’s market cheerleader was former Goldman Sachs Director, Mario Draghi, who said the ECB is prepared to deploy its full range of stimulus measures to fight low inflation, indicating that the Central Bank will apply additional easy money policies at its next meeting in December.   

That sent the Euro down half a point and, so far, the Dollar is up 0.5% to match, which is pushing oil back down to $40 (the Dec contract, on it’s last day) and giving us a nice buying opportunity into the weekend on both /CLF6 (the Jan contract, now $41.50) and /RBF6 (Jan Gasoline, now $1.275) into next week’s holiday.  For the Futures impaired – the Gasoline ETF (UGA) should be at $28.75 and that should put the Dec $29 calls under $1 – a fun way to pay for a tank of gas for next week’s visit to Grandma’s.

Keep in mind that Draghi is a guy who thinks Bankers should run the World, the quote in this picture comes from 

 and, since then, he’s simply moving his agenda forward, in a subtle(ish), diplomatic fashion:

 “It is not that we want to replace the national supervisory authorities; on the contrary, we want to work closely with them. However, they need to be independent of their governments in their assessment of the problems. In the past, problems in the banking sector have been hushed up time and again.

“I am not going to mention any names. However, I am certain that we will be able to act more independently and quickly if Frankfurt is at the heart of the decision-making.”

On our side of the pond, the NY Fed’s Bill Dudley (former Goldman Chief Economist) was heard saying, in his opening remarks at a regulation conference: “If we begin to raise interest rates, that’s a good thing. That’s not a bad thing.”  Indeed GS has all their minions flying around the World saying anything and doing anything they can to get the S&P over 2,058.90, which is where we were at the market close on Dec 31st of 2014.  Since then, the markets have gone nowhere and it’s hard to get prospective clients to give you Trillions of Dollars to collect fees on if they don’t think the markets are going to make them rich.