It’s probably nothing

And so our weakening US / Global growth outlook playbook hums along. Another piece of the jigsaw fell into place this morning with the reported plunge in US retail sales in December 2018 vs the prior month the worst in nine years. The headline number declined in almost every category on record. Overall retail sales […]

S&P 500 earnings expectations

Let’s start with something that certainly made me chuckle before we get to the more dire stuff: Following on from my earlier post about a potential earnings recession on the horizon, according to Michael Wilson, Head of US equity strategy at Morgan Stanley: “Earnings revisions have been some of the worst we’ve ever observed in […]

QE in perpetuity?

Could it be Japan all over again? Or Europe? Japan and the BoJ have been at it for nearly three decades and yet the economy and the deflationary forces at work (debt, demographics, globalization and technology inflections) haven’t budged at all.  More recently we have seen the same thing in Europe where the ECB has […]