The stock market may finally be paying attention to market fundamentals, primarily the slowing global economy, from China and Japan in the East to Europe and the U.S. in the West.

Stocks have fallen for the past four out of five sessions. The S&P 500 (^GSPC) closed Thursday at 1,542, or 3% below its record high of just under 1,600, reached a week ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) also ended lower Thursday, at 14,537, down 2% from its record high of 14,865.

The recent decline in the stock market begs the question: Is the rally over or is this simply a correction in a bigger bull market?

The Daily Ticker put the question to Barry Ritholtz, the CEO and director of Equity Research at Fusion IQ. His answer essentially: not yet.

Related: U.S. Stock Market is 'Overvalued, Overbought and Overbullish': John Hussman

“This bull run will eventually end…[and] the best way to handle that trade is to wait for the market to tell you the run is over,” says Ritholtz. But it hasn’t said that

Apple’s (AAPL) stock has been in free-fall over the last few months, shedding 42% of its value after reaching an all-time high of $705.07 last September. Shares were falling hard again Thursday and could end the trading day below $400 a share -- the first time since December 2011. (Update: Apple shares closed down 2.6% at $392.18 after breaking $390 intraday. Nearly 23 million shares traded vs. the average of 17.4 million in the prior three months).

Wall Street analysts have also changed their tune on the iPhone maker. When the stock was exploding to new highs last year, analysts were clamoring to declare new price targets. One would be forgiven to assume a “who is the biggest Apple bull?" competition was taking place during this heady time.

Now, estimates have been reconfigured and reevaluated to reflect a grim reality: the company’s rapid hot growth is cooling, new product announcements are ebbing and Apple’s celebrated “cool” factor may be over. Some people are even comparing Apple

It’s a big reporting season right now, not just for corporate earnings, but also for disclosure of political contributions.

“It’s almost like an earnings report but they all come in on the same day,” says Kent Cooper, editor of Roll Call’s new Political Moneyline blog which tracks Federal Election Commission disclosures. “Most of your candidates, PACs of companies, and trade associations report on a quarterly basis where they are raising money and how they’re spending it, [and] who is contributing it.”

Related: There’s No Money for the President’s Economic Proposals: Fmr. CBO Dir. Douglas Holtz-Eakin

Cooper has been combing through FEC documents to follow the money. He talked to The Daily Ticker about some of his most interesting and salacious recent findings in the accompanying video.

Here are a few:

• Defense Contractors like Lockheed Martin (LMT) and Honeywell (HON) have stepped up spending (note: these companies also conduct non-defense business with the government). The Lockheed

Morgan Stanley (MS) Thursday joined the ranks of banks exceeding expectations for first quarter earnings. Excluding special charges, the firm posted a profit of $1.2 billion or 61 cents a share—above analysts’ expectations of 57 cents.

Brad Hintz, banking analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., says Morgan Stanley’s earnings show “very good operating performance in Q1,” beating on revenues, cutting expenses and meeting margin targets in wealth management.

Still, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman might want to hold off on celebrating this good earnings news.

At market open, Morgan Stanley shares were trading 4% below Wednesday’s close--a decline much larger than the overall market's. Investors may be worried about the company's future.

The firm has shifted its focus from investment banking and trading to wealth management, which yielded a record pre-tax profit and underpinned the firm’s stronger first quarter earnings. But the wealth management business in general “probably isn’t going to

In the 1970s, future shock was a huge issue. Theorists feared that technology was progressing so quickly that people would soon be unable to keep up or even cope. Today, Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and head of Code Literacy at Codecademy, argues that the future is here and what we’re faced with is present shock.

Because of technological advancements, we have a new relationship with time where there is a persistent need for immediacy. Rushkoff claims that we live in “an always-on 'now' where the priorities of this moment seem to be everything.” As a result, our sense of the future, direction, and goals are lost.

“You can go into a shock about it,” Rushkoff tells The Daily Ticker, “where you’re just chasing the moment and responding to every Twitter feed and kind of acting like an air traffic controller.”

We are constantly on our phones, trying to figure out if anything better is happening somewhere else. We expect political action immediately. We want answers before they

Austerity has become almost like a four-letter word in some circles. It’s used to describe policies meant to reduce government spending and debt that may be painful in the here and now -- measures such as cuts to social services, or that lead to job losses in the short-term. A key piece of empirical research policymakers have used to justify “austerity measures” has been a 2010 study by two Harvard economists, Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, about the downside of high debt.

Related: Krugman: Yes, We Have To Fix The Deficit Eventually–But Not Now

Well now another set of academics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst have replicated the study. They discovered that thee Harvard professors made an Excel coding error in their research – one that mattered for the results, along with a few other issues.

But before you say 'bring on the government spending gravy train,' let’s back up. What was the original study to begin with?

Related: Obama’s Budget Is a Ridiculous Charade: Doug

Provided by Business Insider

Wall Street has basically given up on Apple (AAPL).

The stock has tanked more than 40% from a peak of $702 last September to a new low of about ~$401 this afternoon.

The stock is also now trading at a price-earnings ratio of 9X.

That P/E ratio is well below the market average, which is about 15X. It is also a valuation so low that it is generally awarded only to companies that Wall Street thinks are permanently screwed.

Apple also has ~$150 billion of cash and no debt, which means that the market's assessment of Apple's actual business is even more pessimistic. (If you buy the stock, you get the $150 billion of cash along with the company). Apple is also already paying a dividend of 2.5% — and this dividend is expected to increase going forward.

To put this in the most direct terms: Apple is now trading at a lower valuation than Dell (DELL).

That is a seriously low valuation! And it's one that suggests that there may be a compelling risk/reward for those

Investment in clean energy, like global economic growth, is shifting from West to East, with China leading the pack. China accounts for 30% of the world’s investment in green energy, outspending the U.S.—the number two market for green energy-- by almost 2:1. That's according to a new report from the The Pew Charitable Trust based on 2012 data.

Green investments in China in 2012 rose 20% to $65 billion while they fell 37% in the U.S. to just under $36 billion.

“Clean energy will be one of the biggest industries of the next 10, 20 years, and we’re handing it to China,” says Ramez Naam, computer scientiss and author of the new book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. Green energy will “become a multi-trillion-dollar industry."

China is not only spending more money on green energy, it’s also writing laws and changing regulations will help attract more of those green dollars in the future. China is launching a cap-and-trade program in two regions this June which