Over the past year, based on his increasingly more dour media appearances, billionaire Carl Icahn had been getting progressively more bearish. At first, he was mostly pessimistic about junk bonds, saying last May that "what's even more dangerous than the actual stock market is the high yield market." As the year progressed his pessimism become more acute and in December he said that the "meltdown in high yield is just beginning." It culminated in February when he said on CNBC that a "day of reckoning is coming."

A Southern reader who identifies himself as “Christian, Catholic, Republican, veteran (peacetime)” writes to say:

Submitted by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,

M. King Hubbert did more to raise awareness of the finite nature of global oil reserves than any other person, living or dead. He was a larger-than-life figure, who fought tirelessly to insert the limits of nature into the national dialog regarding the strategic use of resources. Yet surprisingly little has been publicly documented about the man, even though we are hurtling ever faster into a future shaped by the very limits he warned about.

The realized (actual) volatility of the US equity market has plunged in recent weeks to its lowest since April 2015 as an odd complacency washed across risk assets emboldened by "whatever it takes" synonyms spewing from every and any central banker in the world. However, options traders appear to be losing faith in the market turmoil cease-fire as implied volatility (the market's best guess at future uncertainty) trades at its largest premium to historical volatility in over a year.

Max Boot laments Trump’s victory:

That’s why, despite my disagreements with social conservatives, I worked as a foreign policy advisor to John McCain in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012 and Marco Rubio this year. All of those candidates, different as they were, recognizably represented Reagan Republicanism.

For the time being, at least, that Republican Party is dead. It was wounded by the tea party absolutists who insisted on political purity and rejected any compromise. Now it has been killed by Donald Trump.