is it Citigroup or Obama that is saving the stock market today?

after a really bad week of drops the markets started to go up on Friday afternoon, closing the market up about 494 points (during a week where we mostly saw drops)

as I write this the market is up 209 points.

now I am wondering what is causing this good news.

a lot of people are thinking that some of it is do to news recently being made by Obama. the market went up after it was leaked that Obama will pick Timothy Geithner to be his Treasury Secretary.

and over the week Obama released a web video where he talked about his economic plan.

and this after noon he gave a press conference.

are stockbrokers feeling good about the choices Obama is making causing the market to go up? or is there something else.

The market did go up to day but it actually started to dip a little when Obama gave his press conference.

and in fact Obama wasn't the only one making financial news this weekend. there was a G20 meeting over the weekend and the government has announced plans to buy $20 billion in Citigroup preferred stock and back the banks assets by up to $309 billion.

if you look at many financial news site they look at the citigroup news to explain the jump in the market.

But I think it's a bit odd to say that people are buying more stock because of the news of the government pumping more cash into citigroup giving that was hardly the response when they did that before with citi and the other finical intuitions.

now maybe people are just getting us to it in the last few month and are start seeing this as an actually good thing.

or maybe these sites/papers are wrong in saying that is what is causing the bump in the stock market.

now the G 20 meeting have made people feel good enough to invest a little. 20 of the world's countries go together to try and work out away to stop the world market form keeping going into the tank.

I think this may be a real factor in the market up shot.

but at the same time I can see Obama also being a bit of a factor and manly for the same reason. the G 20 and Obama pretty much focused on what we will need to be doing and stating that we wont see the out come sometime in the near future.

big 3 brake 'em down

a few days ago Kenneth Lewis the CEO of Bank of America through his two cents in about he thinks is wrong with the car industry.

He feels that the car industry should consolidate.

Not surprising giving all the merging we are seeing in the bank industry that a head of one of the nations largest banks would have this view. Of course looking at how well the bank industry is doing and the fear that was/is going on about if one of these big banks fail it could bring down the economy (ooops to late :) and one of the big fears about the big 3 going down is that it have bad effect on the economy because of all the jobs that come from the car industry (2 to 3 million) this is poor ideal.

The problem with the American car industry is actually the opposite. the car industry doesn't need to consolidate they need to be broken up into smaller companies.

not only would it cut down on the fact that if a few of these smaller car companies go under it wont be the huge impact on the economy if one (or more) of the big 3 go down.

but we would have more market competitions

and one of the huge reasons the American car industry is in such a bad shape right now was that the heads of the company where to reluctant to make improvements on their cars. making them more fuel efficient, slow to adopt to green tech etc

the big 3 where slow to work on hybrids because they didn't thank they had to and the fact that they thought the market was to small for them.

sure if we broke down the industry into smaller companies odds are lot of those companies would have also flocked to SUV but likely some would have noticed that the market for green cars wasn't really that small and would have tried to services that niche (because really that market wasn't that small) and would have found them selves in a great position when gas prices shoot up.

china stimulates the world's economy

Yesterday China announced that they will spend nearly 600 billion dollars to stimulate their economy.

now they are doing this not by giving the money to banks but building and fixing the nations infrastructure.

the news of this sent many stock markets in Europe and Asia up. The market was also up in America in the morning but by the end of the day the market closed at a lost.