Back in New York, this week and just in time for a landmark,

it looks as though Google has taken over from Apple as the world's largest company by market cap.

This is how those two companies stood at the end of trading today and turn to their market cap.

Then Google announced their earnings which were considerably better than expected,

so were their revenues and judging by after-hours trading,

Their share prices up some 5%, that would be more than enough to take them ahead of Apple.

Now, that's an exciting development,

but in general earnings haven't been better than expected here, in the US.

And in general, stock markets today haven't been exciting at all.

And yes, it was almost exactly flat for the day.

That's followed (by) continued gains in Japan on

the back of Japan's shocking decision to go to negative interest rates on Friday,

but falls in European stocks.

Now, a lot of that could be due to ISM surveys, which we always get in the beginning of the month,

looking at manufacturing date.

Try if we take a look at this next chart, you can see here in the US,

the manufacturing ISM continues to signal contraction.

Yes, manufacturing accounts for a much smaller chunk of the economy than it used to do.

But as you can see, going back to 1980, it really,

this survey really does seem to map very well onto the absent flows of the economy itself.

You can see why this is contributing to growing nervousness about whether

the US economy really is as strong as many people have assumed.

Now that leads into one final big issue which is going to begin to bulk larger,

which is that over the next few hours, we will have the Iowa caucuses and

the process for deciding who the next US president is going to be.

We'll finally move into action.

Now if we take a look at the Iowa Electronic Markets, has no direct connection to the Iowa caucuses.

This is an electronic futures market run by the University Of Iowa,

which allows people to bet on who they think is going to be president.

You can see it's been much less volatile and exciting than the campaign has been so far,

and there is a general sense that the Democrats are more likely to prevail,

better two in three shots at this point.

That really says little more than the electoral map at this moment tends to favor the Democrats

if there's no other particular reasons of votes,

otherwise you would tend to think that the Democrats are more likely to win the presidency.

Well, I doubt very much that this level of calmness about the presidential process can last much longer.

The chances are that we're going to see more volatility there,

and that will be reflected in markets.