It was certainly a busier holiday week than last year!

Well normally Christmas week is pretty quiet, but when the holiday lines up with Friday, it still leaves several good open market days to get some reports out there. While the traffic is definitely lower than usual as far as putting out a number of reports, there were still several very important economic reports released before the holidays, and there was plenty of financial news being covered in the mainstream media, as well.

Some of the top economic stories this week: there’s a general consensus that a combination of jobless claim numbers and good orders numbers for the United States indicates that the worst of the economic recession may be over and there is reason to be optimistic over a slight but seemingly solid rebound in the economy. In response, US stocks are creeping up to their highest values in all of 2009, and two acts of Congress have gotten everyone’s attention.

The first is that the Senate has given their approval to the health care bill. This will easily be the biggest overhaul to the healthcare system in 30 years, and whether the effects are extremely positive, extremely negative, or somewhere in between, have yet to be seen. In addition, Congress raised the debt ceiling for the government to $12.4 trillion, an alarming number and one that will have to be dealt with in the near future to help keep the USD strong, and the US economy firing on all cylinders.

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