presidential elections

Once upon a time, Wall Street analysts had just two things to worry about: interest rate risk and corporate profits - virtually everything else was derived from these.  Unfortuantely, we now live in the new normal, where central banks step in every time there is even a whiff of an imminent market correction (as BofA explained last week), and the result is that nobody know what is and what isn't priced into the market any more, simply because the market in the conventional sense of a future discounting mechanism no longer exists (as Citi explained earlier this summer).

In a historic moment, ignored by much of Western media, Russian military officials have announced the complete and utter defeat of ISIS in Syria. The Russian General Staff issued a statement Wednesday declaring that all territories previously under terrorist control were liberated in a final push by the Syrian Army this week, and with the support of Russian forces. 

Just two weeks ago, Bank of America's Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett came out with what was more or less the most apocalyptic big bank forecast for the coming year. In it, he predicted that the market would not only peak in the first half of 2018, and that there would be a flash crash "a la 1987/1994/1998" in just a few months.

Authored by Geert Wilders via The Gatestone Institute,

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Punxsutawney Phil Hammond, the UK chancellor, presented his Budget yesterday and declared five more years of austerity for Britain. As was to be expected. One doesn’t even have to go into the details of the Budget to understand that it is a dead end street for both the country and for Theresa May’s Tory party.