MBS MID-DAY: 12/7/2011

Treasuries are turning green at the open after a choppy nocturnal session. The market is completely awash in all manner of European headlines and remains mostly devoid of domestic market movers.

It's hard to put into words just how frantic the pace is of new information coming out of Europe. If there's not a Financial Times article to trade, there probably soon will be. Then of course, there will be 17 "government officials" et. al. responding to said article, all getting their own newswire. There's tangible "data-based" news such as Spain announcing bank cleanups, Greece passing new austerity or Von Rompuy suggesting treaty amendments and there's less tangible "opinion-based" news such as what pundits and unnamed "German Officials" say the response will be to those treaty amendments.

Without being in/from Europe or otherwise being experts on EU markets (a position that most stateside analysts/traders/etc find themselves in) the easiest solution in synthesizing the glut of headlines into actionable trading decisions seems to be to follow German Bunds. Those are on a tear lower in yield at the moment and thus, so are US Treasuries, now down 3 bps on the morning to 2.0558 after being as high as the mid 2.12's last night.

MBS are in positive territory as well with Fannie 3.5's up 4 ticks this morning at 102-08. There's no significant economic data scheduled to be released today although MBA applications reported earlier (significantly improved, but from pretty bad levels. Purchase index highest since April though!). We continue heading down this week's expected road--the one that leads to Friday's EU Summit and which is riddled with all manner of EU headlines to consider along the way.