Weekend Reading: Conflicting Barometers

Good Sunday morning and welcome to Weekend Reading. As always, here are some articles and papers worth reading. First, however, a look back at the week that just finished, and a look forward to the week ahead.

It was a mixed holiday-shortened week on the major markets, with the Dow losing 0.5%, the S&P 500 flat, and the Nasdaq Composite up 0.6%.

Next week is going to be full of conflicting market currents. On the one hand, we have a holiday shopping season that has seemingly started off fairly well. On other, we have an early warning from Wal-Mart(WMT Quote) that its own sales are down, and its Web site has been down, too. There are plenty of other sources of confusion out there, like a late-week dollar dive that caught many market participants by surprise and has investors worried that the market knows something that they don't about the U.S. economy in 2007. ...