Today marks the birthday of the great Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, and hence the brief tribute to her classic 1966 song. It’s not obvious that Joni was predicting the markets, but her words sync remarkably well with the two-sided economy, and perhaps the deep political divide as well. Following a near-continuous upward march since the spring, equity markets stumbled somewhat this week on valuation concerns and the now-record long U.S. government shutdown. As we noted in last week’s Focus, the latter is slowly but steadily making more of an impact on the real economy—although the full extent of the damage ... (full story)