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:
Even as the real full year GDP of 6.9% was in line, it was still the lowest since 1990...
Populist cries for trade protectionism are again ringing out, as politicians seek to blame China for bad US monetary and economic policy. But destroying trade will not only make us poorer, it is usually the harbinger of war.