I want to be excited about the new federal budget deal, I really do. I get it: it’s big news that we actually have an agreement—for two years even! We can look forward to an absence of catfights, reduced uncertainty, and less of all the good things that go with minimally responsible government.

And yet, I can’t help but feel depressed that such a minimal agreement warrants front-page news in both major national papers. What does this say about our governance? The other thing that worries me is the extensive caveats in those stories—how the deal may well not pass since the conservative Republican elements in the House are dead set against lifting the sequester spending cuts, while many of the more left-leaning Democrats are dead set against the spending limitations and letting extended unemployment benefits expire.

I’ve talked over and over about the importance of valuations in investing, and Peter Essele, CFA®, a portfolio manager in Commonwealth’s Asset Management group, does a great job of putting that idea to work with the following post. Thanks, Peter!

This year has been an interesting one for investors, especially those with a more global bent to their portfolios. As of yesterday’s close, the S&P 500 and MSCI Emerging Markets Index have returned approximately 26 percent and −3.9 percent, respectively, so far this year. That’s almost a 30-percent difference! To illustrate this, we put together the following chart, which shows the 12-month difference in returns between the S&P 500 and MSCI Emerging Markets over the last decade.

Another surprisingly good economic stat came out today: Employment increased by 203,000 for November, higher than the expected 185,000. Unemployment decreased to 7 percent for the headline U-3 number, while the underemployment rate, the U-6, decreased by a full 0.6 percent to 13.2 percent.

It’s been a very interesting couple of days for the economy and the markets. I’ve pointed out before that, in fact, the economy and the stock market are only loosely connected; good news for one isn’t necessarily good news for the other, and that is now being illustrated very well.

The other key point that we’re getting a much closer look at is the conflict between a recovering economy and the likelihood of continued Federal Reserve support. There is an implicit assumption in current market valuations, in my opinion, that we will get both revenue and EPS growth (which to some extent requires economic growth) and continued Fed support of lower interest rates (which to some extent requires economic weakness). You see the problem here.

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” — Herbert Stein

I’ve been using this quotation in speeches for years. Like several of Churchill’s, it is so wise in its generality that it just keeps suggesting itself.

I spent a week or so recently writing about the problem of money, concluding with a discussion of the dollar’s reserve currency status. There, I noted that, in the next 10 years or so, the dollar would remain the dominant reserve but that other currencies, particularly the euro and the yuan, could also become major reserve currencies if they addressed certain shortcomings.

Per Bloomberg today, the yuan has passed the euro to become the second-most used trade finance currency. Use of the yuan was 8.66 percent in October, up from 1.89 percent in January 2012, while use of the euro dropped from 7.87 percent to 6.64 percent.

I hope everyone had a great holiday. I certainly did, as my sister and her family hosted us for a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner and very fun weekend. Thank you, Beth and Kevin, and thank you, Jake, Jesse, and Max.

Once upon a time, a turkey hatched in the dead of winter. He lived in a nice warm coop, had plentiful corn and seeds to eat, and spent much of his poult-hood playing with all of the other little turkeys. When spring came, he and his friends ventured out into the yard and played some more; they continued to have corn and seeds to eat and shelter from the rain. The summer brought more of the same, along with nice people who regularly cleaned the coop, refilled corn and seed stores after the turkeys gobbled it all up, and chased away scary critters like foxes and cats when they got too near.

I spend quite a bit of my professional life looking for things to worry about, to the extent that I’ve been referred to as “Eeyore.” There’s certainly some justice to this, but I do recognize good things when they happen. For example, I turned bullish on the U.S. economy about two years ago, well ahead of the crowd. That has played out well.

While I do have a bit of bias to the downside, in the spirit of the season (and because I haven’t done it in a while), let’s look at some of the many things we have to be thankful for.

In many respects, cyberspace seems like old hat today. The ironic Onion article about the man who lives in cyberspace, basically buying books on Amazon and checking his friends on Facebook, sums it up nicely. William Gibson’s seminal novel Neuromancer, which introduced the term cyberspace, holds up pretty well, and The Matrix remains entertaining.

My experience yesterday at the Markets Media Global Markets Summit, however, really brought home for me how technology continues to evolve and affect what we do, as investors, on a daily basis. By and large, the panels were concerned with the changes in the trading infrastructure—legal, technological, and institutional—that underlie the financial system.