or bad news for that matter for stocks? here to answer that is karen cavanaugh. she's a strategist for a $200 billion investment platform. she's with voya investment management. karen, welcome, nice to have you here. >> it's nice to be here. thank you. >> so what is front and center for you? we've kind of laid out what the market is facing this week from the fed to china to earnings. but what would be front and center in your book? >> the primary thing that investors should be focused on is earnings. because think about it. everything kind of trickles through that earnings number. there's a global slowdown, oil prices collapsing, it all shows up eventually in earnings. and that's what's happening. >> are earnings as bad as we seem to think they are? there was quite a story in the "wall street journal" this morning. or are they better than we think they are because so much of the pain is in just a couple of sectors, namely energy and materials and industrials? not to minimiz it. >> it's working its way through other sectors. but u.s. corporations, they're more resilient than you wou

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 korchtscontinues to lay out that you like

meeting are due to be released on wednesday. 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