karen cavanaugh. senior market strategist at voya investment management. >>> on wall street stocks held on to most of 4r569 last week's gains falling just slightly as investors wait to see what the federal reserve does and how earnings stack up and what corporate america says about profits but what their commentary is, how the economy is doing as well. dow jones industrial average lost 23 to 17,623, weighed down by apple. it reports earnings tomorrow. nasdaq gained two. the s&p 500 dropped about four. energy shares like exxonmobil and chevron fell along with oil prices. domestic crude sank to a two-month low over concerns of a supply glut and weakening demand. and natural gas prices dropped for a fourth straight session losing nearly 10% today to settle at their lowest level in three years. >>> to the economy now. new home sales tumbled in september to the slowest pace in ten months. economists are citing higher prices and also slower overall economic growth as the reason for that decline. the commerc

joining us now, our "closing bell" exchange karen cavanaugh, mark spellman from alpine funds, eric ristman from russell investments, ron wiener from rdm financial group and our very own rick santelli. okay. let's kick off then with -- let's go to karen first. karen, what is this for? is this all about greece do you really think? >> no. i think we worry a lot about greece and it's a throwback to 2011 where we were worried about contagion, but right now greece is a small part of the eurozone economy. it's not really about greece. there are a lot of other worries investors are worried about. we're in the middle of a sustainable economic expansion. it's driven by accommodative federal policy central banks around the world are accommodative. liquidity isn't drying up anytime soon. earnings are coming in better than ever. corporate earnings we have about three-quarters of them reporting so far. we have growth of over 4%. and it's just normal volatility. that's part of getting back to normal. markets are volatile. >> i find it interesting, ron, given that backdrop that was just laid out and korch

joining us now, karen cavanaugh and bill lee is here head of north america economic at citigroup. bill, we'll talk to you about the economy in just a moment. but this could take stock of where we are. the dow is down 2% for the year. not too dissimilar to what happened last year and mid-august to the end of the year, we saw a 7.5% rally. is there reason to think that we'll see that again? >> if that was the case, it would be people making a lot of money, right? the markets are by definition unpredictable. the u.s. has become a safe pavin and people look at us as a place to park their assets. now the question is, how long will -- >> maybe our dollar and our bond, but not so much stocks lately. >> where is the growth? u.s. and people if they want to buy growth, they come to the u.s. >> have you been telling your clients to buy throughout this period of volatility? >> yeah, absolutely. i think there is different from last year in that the earnings aren't really ahead. last year we had a time of earnings growth. this year earnings are at an all-time high. we're not really seeing that