Dow Jones Industrial Average

“Fed Chair Janet Yellen will be forced to either acknowledge labor market tightening as reason to continue with the four-hike schedule for 2016 or risk her credibility, belittle job market stability and sound a warning about the risks of lower oil prices and cheap gasoline (sacrilege to regular Americans) by slowing the hiking pace after a single 0.25 percent increase last month. If she gets it wrong, things could get ugly fast."

U.S. stocks logged the worst week ever to kick off a new year; is this historically low reading on the “January Barometer” a bad omen going forward?

An angry bear has been released after nearly seven years in hibernation, and the entire world is going to be absolutely shocked by what happens next.

"Some people are never too old to find new ways to lose money."

After getting hammered on the first trading day of 2016, what can we expect from the stock market?

A lot of people were expecting some really great things to happen in 2015, but most of them did not happen.  But what did happen? A global financial crisis began during the second half of 2015 threatens to greatly accelerate as we enter 2016. This is what the early stages of a financial crisis look like, and the worst is yet to come.

My overriding theme and the central drama for the coming year is that unexpected events can take on greater importance as the Federal Reserve ends its near-decade-long Zero Interest Rate Policy. Consensus premises and forecasts will likely fall flat, in a rather spectacular manner. The low-conviction and directionless market that we saw in 2015 could become a no-conviction and very-much-directed market (i.e. one that's directed lower) in 2016. There will be no peace on earth in 2016, and our markets could lose a cushion of protection as valuations contract. (Just as "malinvestment" represented a key theme this year, we expect a compression of price-to-earnings ratios to serve as a big market driver in 2016.) In other words, we don't think 2016 will be fun.

Now, slave, get back to work, if you have a job, and make sure you save some energy for your other part time employment as you will be going to those jobs later today. 

"When the Fed moves next will depend importantly on how inflation evolves. The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation has run below its 2% objective for more than three years. The central bank focused extra attention on the inflation outlook in its statement, saying it would “carefully monitor” actual and expected progress toward the goal. This point implied the Fed will be reluctant to raise rates again unless it sees inflation actually moving up. For now, officials said they were “reasonably confident” inflation would rise."

While the major indexes remain within arm’s length of their 52-week high, the number of stocks hitting new lows is piling up.

Can an economy thrive if it doesn’t make or move physical things? Intuitively the answer is no, because most of the services either maintain the status quo (like healthcare and restaurants) or (like houses) consume rather than build capital. The US, in short, is engaged in an experiment to see how long an economy can function with services growing and manufacturing contracting. As with so many of today’s monetary and fiscal experiments, no one knows when definitive results will come in. But the data so far aren’t encouraging.

With enough monetary deception anything’s possible. But, nonetheless, gravity still exists.

Liquidity in the junk (and all other markets) is evaporating, and according to Citi the spread between an illiquid and liquid junk bond portfolio just hit 100 bps, the most in the history of the series. Meanwhile according to Mohamed El-Erian "The market is comfortable that whenever we hit a hiccup, the Fed is going to come back in," he said. "It's very deeply embedded that central banks are our best friends forever."