Business

Everyone knows that after nearly a decade of capital markets central planning by the world's central banks, "good news is bad news." But did you also know that financial armageddon has become the most bullish catalyst to buy stocks? That's the understated take-home message from the year ahead preview by Macquarie's Viktor Shvets published last week. It is also the conclusion that One River Asset Management's Eric Peters reached in his latest weekend notes.

The last time we looked at the near-record difference between GAAP and non-GAAP Dow Jones earnings, we found that it had crept to a (virtually) unprecedented 25%. To be sure, that was exactly one year ago, when the economy was perceived as being in worse shape than it is now, thanks to the narrative of a "global coordinated recovery" which is really just record central bank liquidity injections, and Chinese credit creation, both of which have recently hit the brakes.

Via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

I encourage you to take a few minutes to review my previous analysis of the effectiveness of tax cuts on the economy.

• Bull Trap – The False Promise Of Tax Cuts
• 3-Myths About Tax Cuts
• It’s The Debt, Stupid

The Committee For A Responsible Budget penned after the passage of the tax bill:

One week ago, Jan Loeys - the person who wrote "The JPMorgan View" for 15 years - announced his exit, as he transitioned from tactical asset allocation to longer-term strategy, and that he would be handing over the authorship to John Normand, and soon Nikos Panigirtzoglou and Marko Kolanovic, but not before summarizing what he has learned in 30 years of investing in a must-read bulletin which he published last week.

Has the fact that the price of a single bitcoin has risen nearly eight-fold so far this year prompted you to turn bearish on the world's most valuable digital currency?

Well, here’s your chance to short it. 

A Swiss asset-management firm called Vontobel launched a new futures product on Friday that will make it easier for retail investors to short bitcoin.