United States

Submitted by Thad Beversdorf via FirstRebuttal.com,

David Zervos Is... "Giddy In Love"

Well Zervos, I just got around to reading your 2015 year end QE love letter.

“The key for 2016 will be to drown out this nonsense with good old fashion QE loving. And so just in time for the New Year, we are bringing out some new swag to help spread the message of QE love. Attached is a picture of our 2016 hat. It’s simple – just a heart on the front with the letters QE inside”

With the exception of a handful of one-time events, it had been such a mild winter across most of the U.S. that numerous retailers have been complaining how negatively impacted their topline has been as a result of the warmer weather (clearly having forgotten how they complained about precisely the opposite in prior years).

Submitted by Olivier Blanchard via The World Economic Forum,

The stock market movements of the last two weeks are puzzling.

Take the China explanation. A collapse of growth in China would indeed be a world-changing event. But there is just no evidence of such a collapse. At most, there is suggestive evidence of a mild slowdown, and even that is far from certain.

While "exceptional' America has been at the butt-end of some superlatives it might prefer not to be recently, the following chart from BofAML's Michael Hartnett showing the world according to free-float equity market capitalization shows that USA is still #1 after all...

Via The World Economic Forum,

The US, with a market cap of $19.8 trillion, is the biggest and represents 52% of the world’s market cap. Japan is in second place at $3 trillion, followed by the UK at $2.7 trillion, and then France at $1.3 trillion.

 

Only the most intellectually dishonest can claim that last night's Chinese economic data deluge was anything but miserable. As we showed last night, everything missed:

• Industrial Production +5.9% (MISS vs +6.0% YoY expectations)
• Retail Sales +11.1% (MISS vs +11.3% YoY expectations)
• Fixed Asset Investment +10.0% (MISS vs +10.2% YoY expectations),
• Q4 GDP growth +6.8% (MISS vs +6.9% YoY expectations).

Even as the real full year GDP of 6.9% was in line, it was still the lowest since 1990...