some free form stuff here…What a week…. just looking at U.S. news, things are good. The consumer is healthy and earnings season ex-energy has been solid. What we had this week was a major divergence of stocks from the economy. It happens when you have so many external forces acting on our market. Negative rates and massive swings in oil are wreaking havoc with things. We almost lost DB, but they now seem to be fine. People finally realized that negative rates are no joke. We’re literally destroying money. That’s the last thing Europe needs. When markets get to such extreme levels of volatility, focusing on the basics is most important. Lots of people are incorrectly looking at the yield curve as signaling recession in the U.S. Looking at any market and believing it is inherently “smart” and capable of telling you something before it happens is wrong. Between the Fed, NIRP in Europe and the collapse in oil, the curve is rendered useless in my opinion. Truth is, all markets are driven by people and are just a function of us. Unless someone is cheating, they don’t know what’s going to happen. Just look at the treasury market. Thursday, people bought the hell out of the long end, just to puke it all up today. At 8:25 this morning, people were all talking recession because the yield curve was flattening so much. That all changed with the retail sales print and the rip higher in oil. We have enough data coming out next week that the curve could steepen dramatically, thus handing massive losses to all the “smart” buyers this week. My point is, anything is possible. Do your own homework and use common sense.  From what I can see, the only market that actually does know something is the job market.