Since President Trump was elected - much to the heart-crushing chagrin of the billionaire class in Silicon Valley and its epic funding of Hillary - the big 5 stocks of the Nasdaq (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft) have gained a stunning $675 billion in market cap.
This pushes them near $3 trillion and well over 10% of the entire US equity market...
Despite paying trillions in Federal taxes every year, Americans' requests for a clear, detailed breakdown of where their money goes every year, have gone unanswered and been ignored by both Republican and Democrat administrations for one simple reason: transparency has an unpleasant way of mutating into accountability, which is the scariest thing imaginable for any career politician.
Not any more.
Presented with no comment...
Source: Townhall.com
Who could have seen this coming?
We have noted the stark divergence between still robust expectations/ surveys/ confidence (soft data) and relatively weak final sales/ production/ spending (hard data) numerous times in the past few months.
But note how the recent collapse in “soft” upside surprises has totally eliminated this gap.
This is relatively straight forward to explain in context. Both the underlying macro data change and consensus indices for soft data were running at post GFC highs at the end of March/early April.