2017 Made No Sense...Fasten Your Seat Belts for 2018

Ben Carlson has a great post out today titled ‘When Things Don’t Make Any Sense‘.

The crypto craze makes no sense to a lot of people, but reading Ben’s post put this mania in some perspective:

By 1990 the total Japanese property market was valued at over 2,000 trillion Yen (around $18 trillion) or 4x the real estate value of the entire U.S.

Grounds on the Imperial Palace were estimated to be worth more than the entire real estate sectors in California or Canada.

Those Japanese were cray cray!

I also loved this piece from Charlie called ‘The Year in Charts‘. Cliff notes version…

1. Volatility died2. The S&P was up every month – a record and also a record 14 months in a row3. Short term interest rates hit highs last seen in 20084. Housing prices surged5. Bitcoin…natch!6. Every major currency was up versus the US Dollar7. We closed out 2017 with the 9th consecutive positive year for the S&P 500, tying the record run from 1991-99.

Months ago, The Economist had a cover with the title ‘The Bull Market in Everything’. Everything but the US Dollar it seems.

This dollar weakness is setting off some monster moves in commodities.

The big unintended consequence from the 2008 crisis, easy money and currency debasement was Bitcoin.

The next big trends are now underway from Trump’s very mentally stable #MAGA.

You may not like the media and the politics, but the markets sure love them.