Today’s video is Exogenous Factors: Middle East and Taiwan. The market has been focused on earnings and the Fed as of late, but, there are a lot of big  exogenous factors that should also be on the radar. Two of those factors are Taiwan and the Middle East.
The is a week with plenty of potential economic trends–although none is so strong that geopolitics couldn’t seize control of the world’s financial markets
Overnight the Shanghai Composite Index fell 7% before new circuit breakers halted trading on the exchange. Other global indexes followed Shanghai’s lead–without matching all the volatility seen in Shanghai.
U.S. stocks fell in the last hour of New York trading after Secretary of State John Kerry raised the odds for armed U.S. intervention in Syria. With U.S. allies and other countries expressing the need to punish the government of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad for what looks like the use of chemical weapons on August 21 in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, markets closed modestly lower.
