After Japan's earthquake, the whole world is wasting its time looking for more black swans.  They would do better to examine the feathers of those snow-white birds in front of us.

None of the key components of US GDP have recovered.  Housing starts, for example, are running at a million less than they were before the crisis began.  Employment is back to the levels it was at 10 years ago -- with 7 million fewer jobs than in 2007.

What happens when the Fed is finished with QE2? Correlation is not causation, but all we can do is look back at what happened last time and speculate about the future.

The market wants change. The feds fight to protect the status quo.

Now the real battle begins on stabilizing the yen.

The US dollar did not end this past week in a good position. In fact, the trade-weighted dollar index actually broke a blatant three-year rising trendline.

The euro defied expectations and set fresh highs against the downtrodden US dollar, fueled by a late recovery in financial market risk sentiment and expansion in emergency measures to contain regional sovereign debt crises.

The British pound broke out of its narrow range on Friday.

After a week of breakneck volatility that saw the Japanese yen surge to a record high only to rapidly reverse course amid the first coordinated G7 FX market intervention in over the decade, the outlook going forward appears anything but clear.