United States

Coming in a little late to the game, UBS today released its top 5 themes and 19 trades for 2018. Not surprising from the bank whose base case S&P forecast is 2,900 one year from now (with potential upside to 3,200), and who just told CNBC that "valuations are still somewhat cheap", the bank is optimistic, if not "rationally euphoric" and writes that it all boils down to one question: will the Kool-Aid party continue, or "will underlying macro shifts reveal fragilities in asset valuations" and more specifically, will the yield curve invert. To wit:

While many in the 'resistance' have vociferously denounced the Senate tax reform bill in the last 48 hours, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers took the proverbial biscuit by warning that "thousands will die as a consequence of this new tax bill."

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the tax bill could reduce insurance coverage by 13m people, which to be conservative we can round down to 10m people.

 

The following article by David Haggith was published on The Great Recession Blog:

Plunder Capitalism

Paul Craig Roberts

The first full week of December is shaping up as rather busy, with such Tier 1 data in the US as the payrolls report, durable goods orders and trade balance. We also get UK PMI data and GDP, retail sales across the Euro Area, as well as central bank meetings including Australia RBA and BoC monetary policy meeting.

Key events per RanSquawk