By Chris Becker
The confidence fairy spread the pixie dust across risk markets last night as talk of stimulus in China outweighed real economy news like lower earnings for S&P500 companies, lower US consumer spending amid higher home sales.
Mergers and buybacks also helped the S&P500 rise more than 1% while European stocks were helped by solid confidence figures on the continent and an unchanged German CPI print (read: it didn’t slip into deflation territory).