So to be clear, this week we had:
And the result - drum roll please - new record highs for The Dow, The S&P, and The Nasdaq... with The Dow's best week of the year!!
S&P futures are slightly lower (ES -0.1%) as traders paid little attention to the latest missile test by North Korea on Friday, with shares and other risk assets barely moving, gold lower and focus rapidly returning to when and where interest rates will go up. Most global market are mostly unfazed, and the Korean Kospi actually closed up 0.4%, by the latest geopolitical escalation after a North Korean ballistic missile flew far enough to put the U.S. territory of Guam in range. European stocks edged fractionally lower while Asian shares advanced.
Former US President Jimmy Carter repeated his assertion that the US works more like an "oligarchy than a democracy," while also lambasting Trump's "hopeless" approach to the increasing tensions with North Korea.
North Korea has responded to the toughest, if watered down, United Nations Security Council sanctions ever imposed against the isolated country with its most strident rhetoric yet.
The latest round of United Nations sanctions against North Korea are designed specifically to prevent Kim Jong Un from obtaining hard currency. Luckily for the Kim regime, there’s always bitcoin.
According to Bloomberg, the isolated country, facing further restrictions on exports that would bring in desperately needed Chinese yuan, has increasingly been turning to bitcoin to circumvent the sanctions.