re: There are some major issues lurking in the US financial markets

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Maxine Waters talking Fed balance sheet

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It reminds me back when Teddy Kennedy would ask a question of Alan Greenspan that had been written for him by a staffer and then when Greenspan would ask for a point of clarification regarding the question, Kennedy would have to turn around and ask a staffer what Greenspan's question meant.

I sometimes felt Greenspan did it just to show everyone that Kennedy didn't have a clue what Kennedy's own question meant.

That’s hilarious

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Can we get Hussss back in here to say 2800 is now when we reach the top of the roller coaster?

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He'd just say we misunderstood what he meant and he's always said 2900 will be the top.

It's at 2814 as I post this.

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You know he's going to jump right back in this conversation the second the market drops lol

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The S&P is now at 2780 so he'll be here soon....

Not surprising, most politicians are just talking heads fronting issues they don't know much about. Staffers are the shadow behind each rep. and senator in our government

Asian markets down big in early trading there on Friday morning. I can’t find any significant news to justify the decline.

Tokyo down 2%+. Shanghai down 3%. Hang Seng down 1.6%.

US futures down a little now.

Pretty ugly jobs report this morning but otherwise good economic data and positive revisions for previous months.

I look at it more as groups of investors bouncing back and forth between two competing narratives, which is what you would expect to happen in transition periods between bull and bear markets. (It's crazy how the market recovered at the end of trading yesterday and nearly reached its Thursday close.)

The consensus view for 2019 had been that, yes, Chinese real estate was tanking and Chinese trade had cratered for Korea, Japan, etc. for the end of 2018, but that the huge PBoC stimulus put into the system had effectively turned the tide and saved the day, and Chinese stocks were poised to climb upward for the rest of the year.

But then imports in Feb 2019 fell 20.7% (vs. -4.8% expected), and imports in Feb 2019 fell 5.2% (vs. -1.4% expected) ( LINK). That's a huge divergence from consensus expectations.

There's also a consensus view that bad Dec 2018 retail sales data in the U.S. (released a few weeks ago) was a fluke, and (according to Kudlow) that the Feb 2018 job growth report was also a fluke. The consensus view is also that corporate earnings will be bad for the 1Q and mediocre for the 2Q, but will return to its normal growth trajectory in 3Q and 4Q. We'll see.

It'll be really interesting to see how the market reacts to guidance on projected corporate earnings for the 3Q and 4Q that will come out from 1Q reporting a couple of months from now.

Anyway, tomorrow will mark the 10-year anniversary of the famous Haines Bottom: " 'Haines Bottom': Remembering a legendary CNBC call 10 years later."

He called it at 9:47am ET on Tuesday, 3/10/2009. The previous day's close would be the lowest close of the bear cycle (although the famous '666' intraday low had occurred on Friday, 3/6/2009). Helluva call.

I hope to make a similar call sometime in 2020 or so. So there are definitely good days ahead. In the meantime though...

BA is going to be fun tomorrow. Could be a trigger if it brings down the whole dow enough.

The runup was unreal, I went in at 315 thinking it was just too low, expecting to get back to the 390 range it was at in Oct, but it overshot it bigtime. Now they have 2 brand new 737 supermaxes go down in similar circumstances within the span of 6 months, with a huge backlog of orders for the same model. There's going to be a ton of precautionary profit taking tomorrow.