From the Slope of Hope: I will start off with a chart that, in a sea of tens of thousands of charts, stood out as shocking:
What the chart represents is the percentage drop from whatever the record high was. In other words, it shows the percentage loss a person would have had if they had bought at the highest point in the history of the market.
On Thursday, just as the S&P hit its latest all time high, the broad US equity index surpassed the 266% increase recorded during the 1949 to 1956 bull market from its March 2009 "generational lows", in the process becoming the 3rd strongest bull market - artificial and central bank-driven as it may be - in history.
It also prompted Citi to calculate the odds of an imminent market correction (one starting in the next 3 months) at 45%.
Even Bernie Sanders has acknowledged that the federal government couldn't afford to provide health care to all of its citizens.
In a video clip from 1987 that was discovered by the Washington Free Beacon, then-Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) admitted that “giving everybody a Medicaid card” would “bankrupt the nation.”
“You want to guarantee that all people have access to health care as you do in Canada," Sanders said.
“Volatility is an instrument of truth," proclaims Artemis Capital's Chris Cole in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, warning that "the more you deny the truth, the more the truth will find you through volatility."
Next Wednesday, the Fed is widely expected to officially launch its balance sheet reduction or "normalization" process, as a result of which it will gradually taper the amount of bonds its reinvests in the process modestly shrinking the Fed's balance sheet.