Business

Back in the summer of 2014, roughly a year and a half before the second bubble of profitless, "story", aka "tech", companies had burst, we wrote in dismay, that "the true indicator of just how bubbly the second coming of the dot com era has become comes courtesy of none other than Jessica Alba's, yes the actress, own startup: a company launched in 2012 and which makes "non-toxic" diapers (as opposed to toxic diapers?), called the Honest Co., has raised $70 million at a valuation just shy of $1 billion in preparation for an IPO."

Despite a slump in consumer confidence, stocks just keep on chugging higher...

While many US companies, especially those in the Russell 2000, have seen their stocks surge in recent days on renewed hopes that Trump tax reform may pass in the coming months (Goldman assigned a 65% probability of Trump tax passing), the reality is that for a vast majority of US corporations a tax cut to 30% or even 25% will have little marginal impact: after all, while US companies may have some the highest statutory tax rate in the world...

... the effective tax rate of the median S&P 500 company is 12% below the statutory rate, or roughly 27%:

Authored by Vitality Katsenelson via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

We are having a hard time finding high-quality companies at attractive valuations.

In September of 2015, not long after Sweden followed the SNB and ECB in going "full NIRP", we warned that "Sweden Goes Full Krugman, Gets Massive Housing Bubble", in which we first showed the unprecedented surge in Swedish home prices, which have been the one asset class to "benefit" the most from the Riksbank's ultra loose monetary policy hoping to stimulate inflation, even as broader economic inflation failed to materialize.