Five reasons to be optimistic

1. Chinese manufacturing is rebounding.
2. News out of the US is not entirely discouraging.
3. As a result, oil prices are starting to drift up. And since production costs have fallen from their boom-induced levels, investment in the oil sands might start to come back.
4. Credit markets are working their way back to normal.
5. The last patch of snow in our yard has finally melted.

I'm particularly excited about that last one.

Comments

[Nick Rowe]

The TSX300 is up about 30% from its low http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=^GSPTSE&t=3m

[Stephen Gordon]

Yes, I have to do a financial data post soon. It's been awhile.

[Andrew F]

My Quebec has a long winter. The snow here in Toronto has been gone for a month.

[Andrew F]

I don't know. It feels to me like we're waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of unwinding the trillions of dollars of derivatives that exist. What I'm most curious about is when inflation will start to kick in in the US.

[David Stinson]

Regarding 4, it may be a bit early to be optimistic:

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/05/of-fingers-and-dikes.html

I can’t claim to have read much about Japan’s problems but, in what I have read (there's a good BIS paper out there somewhere about it), I have been struck by the fact that central bank policies to provide liquidity, “free-up” or "unfreeze" the credit markets, etc., etc., by overpaying for assets and underpricing risk have had (what appears to me to be the eminently foreseeable) consequence of significantly undermining private sector participation in Japan’s capital markets. The danger appears to be that the lender of last resort becomes the lender of "only resort".

[Phillip Huggan]

#3 would apply to employment intensive wind turbines too. Dion would've beat GWB in locating this employment intensive manufacturing supply chain in Canada. It will be too late for Iggy to catch Obama. All still crushed by Europe with their three decade head-start, but Harper could still get the 1st mover advantage on China(who still make crappy turbines for now)/India.

I see an AGW-ed world in the future that exacerbates food shortages. I see Asia falling into African-famine-induced growth rates as Himalayas melt away. I see one of three ways to make fertilizer is from dwindling Natural Gas world reserves. I see one Canadian industry both causing a future famine, and preventing future Canadian governments and industry from addressing the famine (won't be any N.Gas left). Strange definition of "investment". They pyrolize babies tears to extract oil from tar, y'know.

[Pembers]

Credit markets are working their way back to normal. Really ? How can you tell ? Are they not currently being held together with baler twine courtesy of trillions of dollars of Fed support ?