Business

Authored by Jared Dillian via MauldinEconomics.com,

Bubbles aren’t new - they’ve been around since Dutch tulips - but it’s only recently that they’ve worked their way into the average investor’s lexicon. That’s probably because bubbles happen much more frequently these days.

We never used to get a giant speculative bubble every 7–8 years. But that has been the case since the new millennia.

In 2000, we had the dot-com bubble.

In 2007, we had the housing bubble.

With one foot out of the door of Germany's finance ministry, the former head of the German economy, Wolfgang Schäuble, 75, delivered a fire and brimstone warning over the weekend, telling the FT in an interview that there was a danger of "new bubbles" forming due to the trillions of dollars that central banks have pumped into markets. Schäuble also warned of risks to stability in the eurozone, particularly those posed by bank balance sheets burdened by the post-crisis legacy of non-performing loans, something we warned about since 2012, and an issue which remains largely unresolved.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Melt-Up Gains Traction

Back in November, just following the election of President Trump, I wrote about the market entering into potentially the final “melt-up” phase of the cyclical bull market.

How do you know stocks are a little overextended? A good indicator is when even the most bullish sellside analyst on Wall Street, Morgan Stanley's Michael Wilson, whose year-end price target of 2,700 is the highest of all his peers, warns that stocks may see "pullback or consolidation" and that the coming earnings season may be a "sell the news event."

Authored by Tom Sanzillo via ValueWalk.com,

President Trump, who knows a thing or two about bankruptcy, says Puerto Rico’s public debt should be wiped out. We agree.

The commonwealth owes bondholders somewhere on the order of $70 billion, with most of that debt tied to general-obligation bonds, revenue bonds and bonds issued by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA).