United States

One month ago, we first presented several striking charts and observations from Credit Suisse's retail analyst, Christian Buss, who showed the extent of the devastation sweeping through the US retail sector.

To be sure, while the mass shuttering of retail stores - just today Michael Kors announced the company would close up to 125 full-price retail stores - has been a recurrent topic on this website as shown in the chart below...

Via Disobedient Media

James Clapper is known for many things:

As one would expect, last week's report by Bank of America's Benjamin Bowler, in which the strategist stated that "these markets are very weird"...

... and in which Bank of America warned that "US equities continue to set long-term records for instability", prompted many questions from traders and investors.

Authored by Thorstein Polleit via The Mises Institute,

The US bond market trades at a quite high valuation. For instance, the 10-year US Treasury bond presents a price earnings (PE) ratio of 43. In other words: It takes 43 years for the investor to recoup the bond’s purchase price through coupon payments; the bond market’s PE ratio even went up to 68 in June 2012 and July 2016, respectively.

It has been another quiet session for global equity markets, with S&P futures flat, as are European and Asian stocks, which is perhaps odd, as there was quite a bit of newsflow and, in the case of China, outright fireworks.