Business

When you think about municipal bankruptcies, your mind likely conjures images of a decrepit Detroit littered with abandoned auto plants and burned down houses or the rapidly deteriorating city of Chicago with it's gang wars and neighborhoods that look and feel more like an Iraqi battlefield than a U.S. suburb. 

What you likely don't think about is an ultra-posh suburb of San Francisco where the median home will run you over $1 million.  But according to Bloomberg, the wealthy Northern California city of Moraga could be the next Cali domino to fall.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

There are two important areas of the market that have historically been good leading indicators of the strength, or weakness, of the markets and the economy. Oil and retail.

Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

After the 2013 “reflation” selloff, it took just about two years for the treasury market to revisit (10s) the 2013 lows (rates).

In all that time, each and every bond selloff was met by the same assurances that “rates had nowhere to go but up” when instead the underlying fundamentals (economy as well as money/liquidity) were the same throughout.

"The bond market needs to hire a new public relations firm," says former fund manager Richard Breslow, reflecting on the panacea of negativity surrounding the weakness in global bond markets. His suggestion is simple - "get over it" - bond yields are going higher and you better get used to it, it's just needs to be seen for the 'positive' that it is...

Via Bloomberg,

For dip-buyers in the S&P 500, 2017 has actually been a tough year... because there hasn't been any.

As JPMorgan notes, 2017's 3% intra-year decline is the smallest since 1980 (tieing with 1995 which saw a 34% return)

This 3% drawdown (for now), continues a 6 year streak of drawdowns that are dramatically below the longer-term average of 14.1% drops intra-year.

But what happens now that Central Bank balance sheets are set to stop their expansion?