Nice graph from my friends at Weather Trends on retail weather in March/April. As the company says in an accompanying release, March "was the coldest in 6 years, wettest in 10, snowiest in 12 and coldest Easter in 16+ years; the weather finally turned much more favorable for the first half of April".

These twinned before and after images from Myanmar are fairly jaw-dropping. They help explain the scale of this post-cyclone calamity.

[via NASA]

The folks at Bespoke Research have out a fascinating new chart comparing the oil, housing, and tech runs. You can see duration as well as percentage gain -- and the oil price bubble/run just out-did the tech bubble. It has been running longer, and it has newly climbed higher.

Quote du jour comes from Cerberus Capital head, and ex-Treasury guy, John Snow in a Bloomberg interview today:

We don't have long, deep recessions any more in the U.S., as we have internal adjustment mechanisms that cause us to get through these things quickly.

That's a keeper.