Houthi Cry Uncle

Charts: The S&P 500 closed at 1098, up .5%. The index found support at its 100-day moving average.

Fundamentals: Greek bond spreads widened to another all-time record, reversing the improvement seen earlier in the week. A Greek debt default would be catastrophic. Goldman Sachs is trying to broker Greek debt to China. If it makes a deal this particular threat would go away. More US housing data came in worse than expected.

Geopolitics: In Kashmir, Indian and Pak troops engaged in a skirmish across the line of control, trading heavy weapons fire. Al Qaeda has cleverly engineered a spike in terror strikes across Kashmir which has the two rival nations at each other throats. Obviously this decreases Pak Army pressure against the bad guys, although the trick will only work for so long.
In Yemen, the Saudi Army says it has defeated the Houthi rebels and accepted the surrender terms of their leader, Abdul Houthi. Very good news. While the Yemen Army does not have a truce yet with the Houthi it probably will in time. AQAP is now under much more pressure. Clobbering AQAP over the next several months should help funnel the flow of whack-a-mole bad guys into Somalia after the Pak Army eventually invades N. Waziristan. It is better to keep the whack-a-mole effect away from the oil fields of the Saudi peninsula.