Europe

Coming in a little late to the game, UBS today released its top 5 themes and 19 trades for 2018. Not surprising from the bank whose base case S&P forecast is 2,900 one year from now (with potential upside to 3,200), and who just told CNBC that "valuations are still somewhat cheap", the bank is optimistic, if not "rationally euphoric" and writes that it all boils down to one question: will the Kool-Aid party continue, or "will underlying macro shifts reveal fragilities in asset valuations" and more specifically, will the yield curve invert. To wit:

The first full week of December is shaping up as rather busy, with such Tier 1 data in the US as the payrolls report, durable goods orders and trade balance. We also get UK PMI data and GDP, retail sales across the Euro Area, as well as central bank meetings including Australia RBA and BoC monetary policy meeting.

Key events per RanSquawk

The dollar jumped the most in two weeks, pushing Treasury yields as much as 6bps higher (before easing back) with US equity indexes primed for a another record-setting day after Senate Republicans approved a reduction in the corporate tax rate as part of a sweeping overhaul, giving a boost to President Donald Trump’s stimulus plans. The key market catalyst was the US Senate passing the tax reform bill through a vote of 51 vs 49 just before 2am on Saturday morning.

Authored by Soren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

Authored by Eric Zuesse,

The Stanford mathematician William J. Perry was a strategic nuclear advisor to U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and then he became U.S. Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton.