our guest host this morning, ed, rebecca and barry knapp. out over the last hour who's right. because i think you come down to it, you two, rebecca and ed, you guys are thinking that yeah, it's not too late to get in the beginning. barry you're concerned that there is time for a pullback at this point. that maybe we've gotten out a little too far. >> well, last year was very similar. we thought we'd have a decent year but we got something like 90% of the returns in the first month. then we had a growth-related pullback. so we had an earlier guest on talking about high dividend paying stocks. we've been talking about stocks with bond-like characteristics. and while we've written a lot about the limits of fed policy and what it can do for macro economic real growth, and the markets, what it surely does is make fixed income assets more expensive. so the parts of the stock market that look most like the bond market have been benefiting from this for two years. and we think that they'll continue to do so, as money gets forced up the risk continuu

you want to stay tuned for that. >> our guest host this hour are larry bossidy and barry knapp. ess i should. with gene sperling, the republicans finally agreed to raise taxes, and you know, the tax reform we were talking about was get rid of loopholes so you could lower rates and broaden the base. instead of doing that you've got the increase on the wealthy and if you were a republican and you had agreed to that and then they've come back and said okay we've already done that now the loopholes we're going to get rid of we're going to do it in conjunction with raising the higher rates wouldn't you find of feel like they changed the goalposts or they're -- after we've already done it they're going back on the original agreement? >> the problem here is, there's the political side and then there's the economic side. as someone who looks at the economics you'd say the host we've ever collected in government receipts as a percent of gdp is 18.5%. top marginal top rate of 90 we get 18.5 we become greeks. top marginal tax rate at 28 we get 18.5 we become i don't know maybe swiss maybe t

joining us now, barry knapp, head of u.s.lio strategy at barclays and, of course, he needs no introduction. i don't think we've given him introduction so far this morning. ken langone, co-founder of home depot and a former nyse board member. >> nice to be with all of you. >> i'm going to go to barry real quick on this. barry, when you think about both -- some of the indicators we're going to see this week and you think about all the mergers, frankly, we saw last week, and what kayla was just talking about, we've talk a lot about this idea, and i think you've talked about how you've been worried that the market might be ahead of itself. i'm now worried that the market may be behind itself simply because there's this whole newfound sense of confidence that may be keeping this thing going longer than we think. >> well, as far as the sentiment and competence dynamic that the mergers, we did think that business confidence would improve during the course of the year. it was so depressed last year because of public policy, uncertain