This has been a terrible winter—long and brutal, with lots of snow and gray days. I don’t do winter well, but I normally don’t break until around February, which means I only have to tough it out for a little longer. This year, I broke in December. It’s been a long January and February, and it looks like it may be a long March as well.

This is not to announce that I’m moving to Florida (although the subject has come up at home), but to provide some context for the slowdown we’ve seen in many of the economic statistics. Employment has been the worst hit, but retail sales, housing, and durable goods sales (cars) have also shown some damage. The question has been, as we looked at the data, whether this is an actual slowdown in the recovery, and potentially the prelude to a recession, or just a short-term dip caused by the weather.

Over the past couple of days, we’ve seen the market pop (on Friday), drop (on Monday), and pop again (yesterday). Admittedly, there was some news there—the Russian invasion of the Crimea over the weekend—but still, pop/drop/pop seems a bit strange.

I was talking with a reporter the other day who asked me a very reasonable question: “Is there a rational reason for all this activity?” He clearly didn’t think so, and while I certainly saw his point, I took the side of a rational market: given the Russian invasion, it clearly made sense to take risk off the table, and then (in theory) to move back in when it seemed the invasion was over. In the short term, you can make a reasonable case that the market response was rational.

The Ukraine crisis appears to be stalled for now, with Putin—having made his point and essentially occupied the Crimea—deciding to hold there, while the Europeans determine how to proceed. This is probably where we will be for some time, and the markets seem to concur, as they have bounced right back. Move along, nothing to see here.

I don’t necessarily think this story is over, but for the moment, let’s return to a longer-term issue that I discussed on Friday, the U.S. budget deficit. The Congressional Budget Office’s projections are below.

I was meeting with our asset management group this morning, and one of the topics of discussion was a strategy that hedges against inflation using swaps instead of TIPs. This is a fairly esoteric topic, certainly more so than I normally cover here, but it got me thinking about where inflation might be going and why. Is now the time to start thinking about this risk?

What is most interesting in the news is usually the dog that’s not barking. Economics and finance are pretty much absent from the headlines today. Instead, front-page articles in the major newspapers cover childhood obesity, NSA phone surveillance, the Ukraine, and seed-company data harvesting.

This is a shame, but pretty typical. Usually, the best place to look for what will be important in the future is deeper in the paper. Tomorrow’s front-page stories come from further back, and today they’re focused on taxes.

Check out Brad’s February 7 interview on Bloomberg Radio’s Taking Stock with hosts Pimm Fox and Carol Massar.

[audio http://theindependentmarketobserver.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/02072014-mcmillian.mp3]

Housing has been doing a back-and-forth over the past couple of days, with a number of stats down. Existing home sales were down 5.1 percent in January, with average home prices falling, and housing starts and homebuilder expectations also showing declines. At the same time, other stats, including price increases, remain very strong. In fact, in 2013, home prices rose the most since 2005. What’s going on?

The big picture here is that we should expect moderation in housing and understand that it’s actually a healthy thing. Within that big picture, we can look at several factors—weather, rising mortgage rates, and lower affordability—to decide whether the expected moderation in the housing recovery is going to turn into something worse.

As I’ve written many times before, profit margins are at or close to all-time highs. The reasons are many, but among the most significant are low wage growth (which has kept labor costs down), low effective (not face!) tax rates, and low interest rates. The argument that current equity valuations are reasonable implicitly assumes that these conditions will remain constant for the medium-term future, and I have had a problem with that.

So far, of course, I’ve been wrong. But I’m okay with it, because I expect over time to be right, and the trends are starting to indicate that might be happening. This week alone, several events have suggested these factors may become less favorable to business profits.

We have two interesting things to look at today: a report from the Congressional Budget Office on the effects of a higher minimum wage, and a report that consumer borrowing has ticked up as banks become more willing to lend.

I’ve been getting more “disaster chic” questions recently, and I thought I’d get ahead of what I expect will be the next driver of such concerns. Over the weekend, Mark Hulbert wrote a column about a scary chart that’s making the rounds, showing very real similarities between the way the market behaved before the crash in 1929 and right now.