October 12

Still vulnerable. Lacy Hunt and Van Hoisington.
the whole commentary is very much well worth a read, but this excerpt is notable:

The Fed's adoption of QE2 may lead to severe unintended consequences. There are two possibilities: 1) QE2 does manage to temporarily improve GDP via continued overleveraging of the economy with non-repayable loans, 2) QE2 goes into the history’s dustbin of failed projects, along with QE1, cash for clunkers, tax credits for first time home buyers, and other numerous failed attempts to boost the economy with rebate checks.

For QE2 to work, a renewed borrowing and lending cycle must take place, resulting in a further leveraging of the already highly overleveraged U.S. economy. Such additional leverage would not be beneficial since increasing indebtedness from these levels ultimately leads to economic deterioration, systemic risk, and in the normative case, deflation, as documented by Rinehart and Rogoff in their book, This Time Is Different. Therefore, at best QE2 can be nothing more than a short-term panacea exacerbating the serious structural problems already facing the United States.

OECD updated its Composite Leading Indicators for October.
the OECD characterizes Germany, Japan and Russia as in expansion, a possible peak in the U.S., downturns in China, Canada, India, the U.K., France and Italy, and a slowdown in Brazil