While investors hang on to a story of solid long-term EM growth, what keeps the EM expansion from collapsing is strong government deficit spending, high liquidity from foreign lenders, and speculative markets. This is not your father’s EM sector.

As has often been the case over the past quarter century, the call for the demise of the secular bull market in bonds is premature. We maintain that the secular low in yields is ahead and not behind. The underpinnings of the secular decline in yields—pervasive, chronic overcapacity and financial fragility—all persist.

India had good reason to suspect that black money usage was accelerating in recent years. Their experiment with demonetization will adversely affect the economy in early 2017 but may yield positive benefits further down the line.

Poor 2016 holiday sales at traditional stores will reinvigorate investor worries about their future as continued rapid online sales growth accelerates the retail revolution.

The end of QE will not depress U.S. stock prices. We continue to expect U.S. markets to outperform most other major stock markets around the world.

The consensus still underestimates the profound fundamental dilemma facing emerging markets. We maintain our bearish view on EMs – which we first wrote about in June 2012.

We wrote in the summer of 2013 that China’s leaders “may well feel compelled to shift toward policies that directly harm their EM brethren: currency devaluation, enhanced support and subsidies for exports, and dumping” – all of which have come true over the past few years.

Many think of profit margins for the aggregate economy as they may think about margins for an individual firm – erroneous reasoning that can get investors into serious trouble. The soundest way to think about the determinants of profit margins is to look at the profit sources.

Skyrocketing U.S. public debt will not lead to default, inflation, necessarily higher taxes, or necessarily slower economic growth in the future, given the unique economic environment. Public debt in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan can go much higher than people think–and has before–without causing the dire consequences that many fear.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, the investing public was given a picture of corporate financial performance that was in significant part illusion. This 2001 research report set out to answer the question “Just how widespread and serious is the overstatement of aggregate corporate profits?” The macroeconomic evidence indicates that corporate operating earnings for the Standard & Poor’s 500 during this period were significantly exaggerated—by over 20 percent in some years.