The following article by David Haggith was first published on The Great Recession Blog:

We just saw a major rift open in the US stock market that we haven’t seen since the dot-com bust in 1999. While the Dow rose by almost half a percent to a new all-time high, the NASDAQ, because it is heavier tech stocks, plunged almost 2%. Tech stocks nosedived while others rose to create new highs. Is this a one-off, or has a purge begun for the tech stocks that have driven the nation’s third-longest bull market?Yesterday’s dramatic “rotational” divergence between tech stocks and the rest of the market, which as Sentiment Trader pointed out the only time in history when the Dow Jones closed at a new all time high while the

The following article by David Haggith was first published on the Great Recession Blog.

Summer vacation is here, and the whole global family has arrived at Central-Bank Wonderland, the upside-down, inside-out world that banksters and their puppet politicians call “recovery.” Everyone is talking about it as wizened traders puzzle over how stocks and bonds soared, hand-in-hand, in face of the following list of economic thrills: 
Britain voted to exit the EU, and a handful of other nations are talking openly along similar lines. One major crack in the European Union just happened, and others are forming. (Brexit is the name of this new Earthquake ride near the gates of Wonderland.)
Italy’s oldest bank (also the world’s oldest bank, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena) faces bankruptcy unless it gets bailed out. The bank that has survived the greatest tests of time (founded in 1472 before Columbus sailed the ocean blue) is going down unless it finds a savior! Italy’s prime minister is screaming for tax-payer bailouts. At the same time, one of Germany’s oldest banks and one of the largest — Deutsche Bank — has just about become a penny stock and faces the likelihood of imminent collapse if not bailed out, too. (Welcome to Wonderland’s zombie freak show of the world’s oldest walking-dead banks dying again.