Overnight and Pre-Market

What is really going on in China? I'm sure you have heard of rumors of riots and coup attempts, blogs reporting on this from China have been shut down by the Chinese government. The one soft spot in the underbelly of China ironically comes from its own repressed people. If you want to know what really scares China, it's an uprising of its people. I don't know if their ISM (seeming fiction) is part of a campaign to pacify the mob, (things are better then they really are), remember the video I posted of China's ghost cities? Realtors on the street corners trying to sell to passing cars? In any case, the Manufacturing ISM which has diverged hugely from HSBC's take is certainly suspect; just look at commodity performance.

Overnight China released their services PMI at 58 (?!?!?) which also saw a revision of February's contractionary 48.4 to a stunning 57.3! They adjusted January as well from 52.9 to 55.7.

European PMI was up slightly on a year over year basis from  3.5 on consensus of 3.5.

Spain (That's the country to keep an eye on) saw unemployment rise for the 8th consecutive time by nearly 39k to 4.75 million or 23.6% and Spain's home prices are expected to fall this year to a fresh new record. The EU market is struggling today (I only expected a bounce there off support) and Spain and Portugal's yields continue to rise.

Ireland's Fiscal Panel says more cuts may be needed to reach their 2012 targets. An EU/ECB report confirms the expectation that Portugal will see greater contraction then originally thought-(remember the Portuguese Finance Minister caught on mic. talking to the German FM and Schaueble said words to the effect of, "We'll help you next after we are done with Greece"?).

The FT obtained a report saying that this weekend's EU Fin Min meeting had Italy's Budget as the #3 priority on the agenda, saying if there's any slippage of growth or rise in borrowing rates (like we have seen thus last week) that Italy would have to make more cuts, something Italian PM Monti has already ruled out. Everything that is fixed in the EU is apparently still broken as I warned they were about to come roaring back in to the news/fundamental cycle.

Today's big event in the US is the release of the FOMC minutes at 2 p.m.

Here's ES overnight...