As usual on Friday, more volume = more selling.
Still, there's no reason to expect volume to come back and that means the markets can go back to drifiting higher when the bars are lower and that can get us all the way to S&P 2,000, but over that line is going to be a tough trick.
Our weekend reading from our Member Chat Room produced the usual litany of woes with the usual suspects: ISIS, Putin, China, Gaza, Ebola and Draghi causing the usual damage aided by newcomes like an earthquake in San Francisco, a volcano in Iceland, a nuclear scare in Belgium - but none are as scary as French President and Austerity Radical, Francios Holland, dissolving his Government because they disagreed with him.
In interviews with the French press and speeches at a Socialist gathering Sunday, Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg and Education Minister Benoît Hamon said forcibly reducing budget deficits as the economy wilts is driving up unemployment, fueling political extremism and risks tipping the economy into recession. "The priority must be exiting crisis and the dogmatic reduction of deficits should come second," Mr. Montebourg said in an interview with Le Monde.
The criticism came at a difficult moment for the French president, who said earlier this week he will push ahead with a three-year plan to cut public spending to fund tax cuts for business even as the economy stagnates – so he fired them all! As in the US, Businesses continued cutting investment in the second quarter despite receiving the first payouts from labor-tax reductions.
"Promising to get the economy going again, on the path to growth and full employment, hasn't worked. Honesty obliges us to acknowledge this," Mr. Montebourg said in a speech to supporters. "The role of the economy minister and any statesman in his place is to confront the truth—even it is cruel—and propose alternative solutions," he added.
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