United States

VIX was being crushed and stocks were leaking higher just as planned, until Secretary of State Rex Tillerson hit the tape beating war drums and announcing a new US policy on Syria, just a week after he said the US had no interest in removing the Syrian president.

Specifically, Tillerson said that steps are underway to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and that the U.S. is considering an "appropriate response" to the Syrian government's alleged use of chemical weapons.

In an unexpected statement made by the former COO of Goldman Sachs and current director of Trump's National Economic Council, Gary Cohn told a private meeting with lawmakers on the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday evening that he could support legislation breaking up the largest U.S.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

There is a really big crisis coming.

Think about it this way.

After 8 years and a 230% stock market advance the pension funds of Dallas, Chicago, and Houston are in severe trouble. But it isn’t just these municipalities that are in trouble, but also most of the public and private pensions that still operate in the country today.

Today’s China-U.S. summit meeting is an event that could also have enormous implications - in both directions. As Bloomberg's Richard Breslow notes, one can't help but be intrigued by the fact that while everyone is looking at the S&P 500, this morning the Shanghai composite traded at its highest level of the year.

S&P futures are little changed at 6am ET, trading at 2347.55 and paring an earlier 0.4 percent drop, on the back of the USDJPY ramp which for the second day in a row has emerged alongside the European open, just as the key 110 support level appears in danger, soothing concerns about the Fed's balance sheet reduction and "some" Fed officials warning that stocks have gotten expensive.