Monday Morning – Getting Set for Earnings Season

As noted on the chart on the right from Josh Brown, the chief selling point to investing in the US is we don't suck as much as the rest of the World.  This is a very compelling argument for people who are forced to live in the rest of the World – as you generally don't have to draw them a map for them to understand how much the economy sucks "over there."

The US is hardly performing it's historic role as the engine of Global Growth.  In fact, that's a role we ceded to Japan in the 70s and China in the 90s and they've both blown up and you might think it's up to us to take the lead but, before we drove the World's economic growth, there was a land called Europe – and they used to own the whole thing (or at least acted like they did).  

Europe made an attempt to reclaim their old glory by unionizing back in 1993 and, since then, they've slapped together 28 countries with 500M people and have gotten their GDP to a bit higher than the US, at $16.5Tn.  Global GDP is $60Tn so the US (310M people) and Europe (500M people) have more than half while the rest of the World (6,190M people) get to "share" the remaining $27.5Tn, which works out to a per capita of $4,442 each for THEM and $40,123 for US.  Yay Us!!!!

If you pull Japan ($6Tn, 127M people) out of them, it gets a lot uglier for the remaining THEM but, as Pink Floyd said:  

Us and Them
And after all we're only ordinary men

Down and Out
It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about
With, without
And who'll deny that's what the fightings all about

IN PROGRESS

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