Three months ago, we noted that if there’s anything the IMF is good at, it’s cutting global growth forecasts, something the Fund did for the fourth time in twelve months in October.
While "exceptional' America has been at the butt-end of some superlatives it might prefer not to be recently, the following chart from BofAML's Michael Hartnett showing the world according to free-float equity market capitalization shows that USA is still #1 after all...
Via The World Economic Forum,
The US, with a market cap of $19.8 trillion, is the biggest and represents 52% of the world’s market cap. Japan is in second place at $3 trillion, followed by the UK at $2.7 trillion, and then France at $1.3 trillion.
Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
We’ve only really been in two weeks of trading in the new year, things are looking pretty bad to say the least, so predictably the press are asking -and often answering- questions about when the slump will be over. Rebound, recovery, the usual terminology. When will we get back to growth?
In the aftermath of Citi and JPM's earnings last week, the only thing investors wanted to know about when it came to the just released Bank of America earnings moments ago, was the bank's energy exposure, and we'll get to that in a second, but first here are the housekeeping items.