To an extent, no matter what happens with earnings reports over the next week, the Middle East is still going to hold us back.

Unless something happens in the Middle East or the dollar has a significant move, then I suspect that the next few days we are just going to see the market drifting.

Next week we have a raft of earnings in the tech sector, with STM, Philips and Nokia. We have got to see evidence that if the bad news is not turning into good news, then at least the bad news is slowing,

There's going to be this flip-flop next week and continually until we get through earnings season, going from earnings to worrying about the economic slowdown and what inflation brings so I think next week is going to be marked by that. We're getting to the point where the market needs good earnings. It needs to have a catalyst to get the growth sector moving again.

It took from 1967 to 2003—over three decades—to build the big men. It took a decade—2003 to 2013—to destroy them. I suspect a new generation of big men will return. No people can tolerate chaos forever. Dictators will offer a way out and many of the exhausted and brutalized people of the Middle East will accept them, and I suspect Washington will as well.

This was the first time I had come face-to-face with the other side of fundamentalism. The fundamentalism that I saw in my neighborhood was sexist and misogynistic and small-minded, but it wasn’t violent. It was giving and loving and brotherly. It was about helping the poor, and since everybody was poor, that meant everybody helping everybody. There wasn’t the kind of urban meanness you find in many American cities. It was as if a farm community had been transplanted to the city.