United States

It was about a year ago when, in a note brimming with optimism, Goldman Sachs (which had just released its Top 6 trades for 2016, 5 of which would close out at a loss just two months later) predicted that the Fed would hike rates 3 times in 2016, a year in which the economy was expected to storm higher. It has yet to hike them once (although the market is 90%+ convinced this will happen next month) even as the economy has done virtually nothing, and some can argue contracted further for most of the world class leading to Donald Trump's "surprise" victory. 

For the past year, Deutsche Bank was one of the most stubbornly pessimistic banks. Then, overnight, everything changed for one reason: Donald Trump.

The German bank laid out its 180-degree change in opinion in a 30-page Friday note titled "Trump: the huge picture for stocks", in which it revealed that it now expects the S&P to easily rise to 2,250 by Trump's inauguration, and then rise to 2,500 by 2018 "before suffering its next bear market."

While not necessarily the "huge picture", here is the big picture summary of DB's note:

US President Barack Obama strongly defended globalization during his visit to Germany on his final European tour before leaving office. Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel held a joint press conference and penned an article where they both stressed that globalization was here to stay.

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

When Donald Trump would not state with certainty that he would accept the election results before even knowing what the results were or how they might come about, liberals wrung their hands all over the media in grief over the loss of democracy as we know it. Hillary, herself, decried that she had never heard anything so anti-democratic and unAmerican in her life.

As China's president Xi was setting the stage for a new regional free-trade deal dubbed the Free Trade Area of Asia-Pacific at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Lima, Peru now that Obama's TPP has suffered a quiet death, a new geopolitical axis was being formed.