United States

Authored by Jessica Marmor Shaw, originally posted at MarketWatch.com,

For decades, California has been portrayed as the epicenter of earthquake country. Last year’s disaster movie “San Andreas,” in which a magnitude-9.0 quake lays waste to the state, was just the latest and most spectacular example.

Yet the Golden State has never been the No. 1 state for seismic activity. That title goes to Alaska, which sits atop two tectonic plates that bump into each other and produce an average of 1,000 tremors every month.

Even Bloomberg gets it.

In a note issued yesterday, the news behemoth reported what our readers had known for years: that "There's Only One Buyer Keeping S&P 500's Bull Market Alive", namely corporate buybacks, the same "buyer" of stocks that the smart money has been selling to for the past 7 weeks.

Dispelling any confusion about who the relentless buyer into the "wall of worry" is, this is what Bloomberg wrote:

Hillary Clinton appeared to forget the killing of four US citizens during an attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi when she insisted that “we did not lose a single person in Libya”. Clinton made the comment while defending her push for regime change in the war-torn North African nation at an Illinois town hall event on Monday. Talk about having a selective memory….. Could this be an early sign of dementia or has Mrs Clinton spent so much of her life lying that she now finds it hard to distinguish what is real from what is fantasy?

One week ago, as the bear market rally was about to hit its peak post-ECB crescendo, we reported that according to Bank of America data, "The "Smart Money" Is Quietly Getting Out Of Dodge: Sells For A Sixth Straight Week As Buybacks Soar." 

One weekend ago, in an unexpected episode of Zero Hedge trolling by Jefferies economists, the junk-bond focused mid-tier investment bank sent out a note in which it defended the "recovery" as follows: