Just Another Manic Monday – More Signs of Global Slowing Amid China Troubles

Let's see what kind of trouble the World got into over the weekend:

• YouTube got hacked.
• Thomas Cook (huge UK travel agency) went bankrupt, stranding 150,000 people overseas.
• $1,100,000,000,000 has moved from equites into bonds.
• Trump has a brand-new scandal with impeachable offenses AND 69% of the voters now say they dislike the President..  
• China trade talks are not looking good.
• German Industrial Production is contracting rapidly.
• The rest of Europe is near a Recession.
• 130 banks representing over 1/3 of the Global Economy ($47Tn) are demanding climate action.
• Trump can't find allies to help in the Middle East.
• We're still having liquidity issues.

So it's the same old, same old but, fortunately, we don't care because we CASHED OUT almost all of our positions last week and now we've got ringside seats for Q4, which starts in a week – it's going to be FUN!

It's not that we're particularly short on the markets – we aren't making many short bets – it's just that we've lost faith in the bullish premise and we do expect a correction but, the way the Fed and the Trump Adminstration rush in to prop up every dip in the markets – we're certainly not ready to make a bear case.  

The same cannot be said for our friend David Rosenberg, who expects a PAINFUL pullback in the next 12 months EVEN if the Fed were to cut rates to ZERO.  “The economy is already slowing down,” Rosenberg said. “Earnings are actually contracting.”  Well Duh!, Dave – we've been talking about that for ages.  The question is – will it MATTER?  Back in 2007, I used to call it the "It Just Doesn't Matter" rally as the market just seemed to ignore any bad news and go higher and higher – no matter what was thrown at it until, suddenly, in the fall of 2008 – EVERYTHING started to matter and all the good news in…