Lot’s of news today centered around Chinese M&A and earnings. The Chinese are taking advantage of lower prices to pick up some companies on the cheap. The big earnings story was that McDonald’s (MCD) had their first quarterly miss since 2005. Looking deeper it appears the majority of the problem was simply the strong dollar hurting their F/X conversions. Not a big deal to me. The bigger problem is Spain, and the rest of the PIIGS. It seems like there is indeed going to be a big default coming- no surprise there. Anybody paying attention knows there will be MASSIVE defaults in the Euro zone; it’s just a question of when and how big. Interestingly, the market has recovered almost half the early losses, with an hour and a half before the close. Fun way to start the week.