The aftermath of the new Fed language that implies a much larger probability of zero interest rate policy holding all the way until late 2014 continued to feed into risk assets. At the same time, the markets returned to the make-and-forth rumors on the probability of an agreement on the PSI related to Greece debt paper. In the early going, speculation circulated that private Greece bondholders would accept a 3.75% coupon on new debt, subject to the participation of the ECB in the restructuring exercise.

Last week we attended many heads-of-state addresses to investors in New York City at the time of the United Nations meetings including lunches or dinners with the Presidents of Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Colombia. In this piece we cover our take-aways and perspectives on the region in the face of ongoing global economic tumult. The bottom-line is that regional growth is certainly decelerating amid the global slowdown, but this year Latin America will still grow above potential this year at 4.5% and next year at 4.2% by our forecasts.

As we argued in our December monthly publication, Bulltick's base case is that 2012 will be a year of "resolution". And we think that such resolution promises to be a binery one. In our view, 2012 will be either a very positive year for world equity markets, especially the emerging market ones, following stabilizing dynamics in Europe and decent US growth, or it will prove to be an extremely negative one, following a hypothetical complete collapse of the European banking system

The US "super committee" unsurprisingly failed to deliver the $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction it was tasked to achieve by the November 23rd Thanksgiving deadline. This failure means automatic spending triggers will go into effect starting January 2013, which we outline below. Automatic cuts across the board of the federal budget are not ideal, above all because they do nothing to improve the long-term drains on the US deficit, which are the country's major entitlements programs.