It's official: while Q2 was the best quarter for the economy in decades, in Q3 it is now widely accepted that as we wrote a month ago, the wheels came off as a result of a "sudden negative change." One doesn't have to look too hard to find out why: between today's catastrophic jobs report, the near record plunge in consumer confidence, the troubling contraction in retail sales where reports have missed expectations for 3 months in a row, whether it is due to the end of stimmies or the recent restrictions from the Delta variant, one bank after another took a machete, or in the case of Morgan Stanley, a nuke to their ... (full story)