Breaking news, updates, and reports on current events.
UMich confidence drops as the rate hikes take effect. The people are starting to feel the rate hikes, businesses are starting to feel it, the Fed will be blamed. Credit card delinquencies shoot up. Realtors urge the Fed to slow the rate of interest rate increases. Mortgage financing down to an 18 month low. Trump … Read more
Jimmy Dore points out the hypocrisy of Dems meeting in secret to take money from big corporate donors, and using them for “progressive values”. h/t mikeleoncraft
A controversial law to tackle ‘fake news’ has been passed by French parliament – nearly a year after President Macron vowed to clamp down on what he called – ‘destabilisation’ efforts. https://youtu.be/T1hqysu-qpQ h/t salvia_d
via BI: In the era of peak quantitative easing (QE), there weren’t many options out there for investors seeking a little bit of yield. Government bond yields were ultra-low, corporate debt yields, especially for investment grade, weren’t much higher, while commodities and cryptocurrencies and, in most instances, cash, didn’t even offer yields. That meant the … Read more
via David Yong (Bloomberg) — Signs of credit stress globally are increasing. In Asia, prices for the region’s riskiest debt slid to the lowest level in almost seven years, and the cost to protect against default climbed amid a sell-off in global markets. The average price for junk-rated corporate notes fell to 90 cents on the … Read more
Almost 3 in 10 shoppers are going into the holiday season still carrying debt from last year’s festivities. Experts suggest crafting a strategy in two parts: Wrangle your debt and scale back your holiday budget. For some people, opening up a credit card statement is like a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past. … Read more
Fireworks coming !!! GAMECHANGER … Trump names hand-picked panel to investigate intelligence community Posted by Kane on November 21, 2018 6:10 pm Categories: Breaking Very interesting new piece from Washington Examiner… Trump names hand-picked panel to supervise, investigate intelligence community With Republicans poised to lose control of investigatory panels in the House of Representatives, President … Read more
by sundance [OK, take note – this official Butte County statement now leads me to add a ‘Paradise Fire’ tab to the category listings on the right margin of the page. This evolving story deserves continued and ongoing review.] Today, Butte County health officials are establishing a the legal predicate to stop residents of Paradise, CA … Read more
by jessefelder “To achieve superior investment results, you have to hold non-consensus views regarding value, and they have to be right. That’s not easy… The good news is that the prevalence of first level thinkers increases the returns available to second level thinkers. To consistently achieve superior investment returns, you must be one of them.” -Howard … Read more
BY SRSROCCO Global debt increased at the fastest rate at the beginning of 2018. In just one quarter, total global debt jumped by more than $8 trillion. That is quite surprising as total world debt rose by $22 trillion for the full year in 2017. Thus, the increase in global debt last year averaged $5.5 … Read more
Think back to when you saw that first Star Wars movie from 1977, and how the Death Star – this massive, cold, metal, ruthless, demonic Imperial battle station the size of a moon – was armed, mobilized & brutal enough to outright zap entire planets to bits from open space with its harnessed, martialized, concentrated, … Read more
From Birch Gold Group Home builders across the U.S. are struggling to come to grips with an incredibly toxic combination of rising rates and lack of affordability in the housing market. National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Chairman Randy Noel downplayed the situation, saying customers are “taking a pause” to see how high rates will go and keeping an eye … Read more
by Dr. Eowyn During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and his “deplorable” supporters repeatedly called for “locking up” Hillary Clinton for her illegal use of a private email server when she was Obama’s secretary of state. If you’ve wondered why President Trump hadn’t “locked her up,” you should know it is not for his … Read more
By Bill Bonner BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – Today will be an interesting day. After falling the last two days, stocks should bounce. And the futures market says they will. But now, we will see what the speculators are really thinking. Will they want to go away for a four-day holiday with the stocks they’re holding? Or … Read more
from Financial Survival Network Gordon T. Long has been watching auto sales for quite some time. Debt keeps going up and now sales are declining. Corporate debt has escalated and it has become a giant equity to debt swap. It can’t keep going the way it’s going and it won’t. According to Gordon it’s all just a … Read more
From Medium: I torched all my old tweets at the beginning of this year, using one of the many websites that help you destroy your online past. Like any reasonable person, I’ve never been a virulent racist or sexist. But the unscrupulous, mass-deletion of personal almanacs has become something of a rite of passage for anyone … Read more
TESLA ‘Gigafactory 2’ — mostly empty…Built with $750 million in taxpayer funds… After $750 million in subsidies and years of delays, critics say the Tesla CEO hasn’t done enough for the Gigafactory 2 solar panel factory. Just south of downtown Buffalo, near abandoned factories and crumbling brick warehouses, is a 1.2-million-square-foot white box with Tesla Inc.’s solar … Read more
Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn thought his rock-star status meant the rules didn’t apply to him. Then came his arrest for financial improprieties. From Bloomberg: The apparent downfall of Carlos Ghosn, the celebrity chief executive officer of Renault and board chairman of Nissan, is the latest example of what can happen when top executives get caught up in … Read more
From Jim Rickards, Editor, The Daily Reckoning: One of the questions I am asked most frequently in my global travels is what will be the cause of the next financial crisis. This question is asked by those who understand that this crisis is coming but want to pin down the date or a specific turn of … Read more
Free Vacations, $100,000 Discounts: Homebuilders Get Desperate… (Bloomberg Businessweek) — Ram Konara, a real estate broker in suburban Dallas, is raking in freebies this year: trips to Lake Tahoe and Santa Barbara in California, Cabo San Lucas in Mexico, and a dude ranch in Wyoming. The homebuyers he represents are cashing in, too. They’re winning … Read more
Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, http://www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter It gets serious. Margin calls? No one knows what the total leverage in the stock market is. But we know it’s huge and has surged in past years, based on the limited data we have, and from reports by various brokers about their “securities-based loans” (SBLs), and from individual fiascos when, … Read more
by John Rubino A recent MarketWatch article notes that: GE was one of Wall Street’s major share buyback operators between 2015 and 2017; it repurchased $40 billion of shares at prices between $20 and $32. The share price is now $8.60, so the company has liquidated between $23 billion and $29 billion of its shareholders’ money on … Read more
via visualcapitalist: For American retailers, Christmas comes a month earlier. Starting in late-November, the holiday shopping season officially kicks into high gear – and it’s the beginning of a month-long stretch that can either make or break retailers. Black Friday is the shotgun start for this mad scramble of consumerism. And whether you are waiting in … Read more
•France will show signs of Grand Solar Minimum first in Europe •Greenland gained 550 billion new tons of ice 2017-2018 •How to identify Atmospheric compression events using global temperature maps •Migrating arctic birds cannot nest too much ice and snow on Greenland this summer •California fires blamed on drought, but record rains last year in … Read more