the vix, the fear index, extraordinarily low last year. i wondered why on earth is it this low when you ve got issues in russia, in north korea, in the middle east. are we now waking up to the fact that, oh, maybe there are problems? i actually think the issue here is a lot more simple. it s something you and i used to talk about a lot in the past. and that s central banks. and monday, we just got a swearing in of a new chair of the central bank. jerome powell took the helm. actually, it was a catastrophic first day for jay. i can t think of a worst day to start then monday. i feel like the market needs to test out the new fed chairman, see what he s made of, see if he s got the same sort of muscle that alan greenspan, ben bernanke and janet yellen had. these folks did a lot for the markets in times of stress. we don t know a lot about jay. we hear he s sort of channeling janet yellen but we don t know. he s a trump nominee.
week. great to be here in this first week of the new year and even with most of congress still away for the holiday, it was an eventful week. to say the least. a new tell-all book on president trump s first year in office, warts and all, has everyone talking. but nothing this president does can hold back the markets, which is exactly where we re going to start. the stock market hit new heights with the dow jones industrial average crossing the 25,000 mark for the first time ever. that s a gain of nearly 25% since president trump first took office. the white house marked the occasion by posting a cnbc news clip on little official website detailing recent gains in share prices and job numbers. nothing investors see coming out of the white house, no matter how lurid or how disturbing seems to worry them. they like the gains trump has made. tax cuts, rolled back regulations, if you put it that way, the market has a lot to celebrate in 2018. something i like to look at is the vix in
people are concerned about risks facing the market. guess what, it has never been as low for two consecutive days since the vix began 28 years ago. and take out the book out trump, all the lunacy, the idiocy, the circus that is the white house. think about the geopolitical risks. think about what is going on in north korea and iran. the market doesn t seem to care. one main reason, they look at the rhetoric out of the white house as just that, noise and rhetoric. the market actually says listen to what he does, not what he says and what he does is deregulate and the market sure likes it. you saw these two ticks up during the course of the year when you look at the fear index and it was around the first news that north korea had militarized a nuclear weapon and so you see the markets getting inurred. i want to return to the data. the white house touting the stock market numbers and the economic numbers. you look at how uneasy this
retailers fell as well after reporting results today. the only index up, utilities. that sector doing well. now, the trouble wasn t confined to the u.s. stocks fell in europe and asia as investors sought offty. only 4 dow stocks were up, including mcdonalds, j&j and coca-cola as consumer stocks did well. liz, back to you. of course, i looked at the fear index. it jumped 43%. that means for those of you that don t know, there s a lot of nervousness at the moment. sure is. thanks for pulling that apart for us. do folks that are counting on tax cuts this year have excessive expectations? the war of words between the president and the gop leaders mount, we will ask the top republican point man on tax cuts, kevin brady. he s here next. mark steyn blasting the media with fire and fury as they zero
pounds lost on the dow. the fear index now for stocks at a four-week high after achieving a low of a ten-year low last week. ten year treasury yields as people are flocking for security and safety and moved into gold, which is up 2,250 as people opt into the safety measures. we went on the streets to see what people say about the sell off. are they worried? this is what they told us. i think people are concerned about the presidency and a lot of optimism after he got elected. we ve had a 20 purse run up in the last year. this is like a 1% pull back? it s absolutely nothing at all. when the markets started going up, i said this is good news. and now you wonder when is the bottom going to come. this could be it. the biggest thing that