The following article by David Haggith was published on The Great Recession Blog:
It was a summer fit for the start of the Epocalypse followed by a fall where every event leans into Halloween. Summer began with a total solar eclipse that cast a long shadow across the nation from sea to shining sea, and fall began with hurricanes, mass bloodshed and fire. And through it all, the stock market barely blinked.
As we pointed out yesterday, October 9 was a landmark day: it marked 10 years to the day since the pre-Global Financial Crisis peak in the S&P 500. How have various asset classes performed since then? That is the question that DB's Jim Reid set off to answer this morning in his latest edition of the "Early Morning Reid."
S&P futures are again modestly in the green as European shares hold steady ahead of a meeting of the Catalan regional parliament and a possible declaration of independence by Catalan leader Puigdemont, while Asian shares rise a the second day. The dollar declined for the 3rd day, its losses accelerating across the board amid growing concerns that Trump's tax reform is once again dead following the Corker spat and a rejection from Paul Ryan, with the move gaining traction after China set the yuan’s fixing stronger for the first time in seven days.
The contemporary low volatility trading environment has been kind to actively managed equity funds - particularly if they piled into large-cap momentum stocks like Facebook and Amazon, which have been responsible for the bulk of this year’s rally.
Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
According to Hyman Minsky, economic stability is not only inevitably followed by instability, it inevitably creates it. Complacent humans being what they are. If he’s right, and would anyone dare doubt it, we’re in for that mushroom cloud on the financial horizon. We know that because market volatility, as measured for instance by the VIX, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE)’s volatility index, is scraping the depths of the Mariana trench.