Europe

Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

This past week, the big news for the market was the release of the April 27th FOMC minutes which once again suggested the Federal Reserve may be on a path to hike rates sooner rather than later. The reality is simple, with the markets hovering on critical support, a Presidential election just around the corner and no real evidence of economic recovery, the likelihood of a rate hike in June is approaching zero.

Here are some key highlights from the meeting minutes:

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   "I've been coming to Singapore once a year for the last 15 years, and flying in I have never seen the waters so full of idle tankers,"

   - Senior European oil trader a day after arriving in the city-state.

Back in November, when the world-record crude inventory glut was still in its early innings, we showed what we then thought was a disturbing image of dozens of oil tankers on anchor near the US oil hub of Galveston, TX, unwilling to unload their cargo at what the owners of the oil thought was too low prices.

American media has repeatedly likened GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump to France's far-right Front-National party leader, and frontrunner in polling for the French 2017 presidential election, Marine Le Pen and while the forthright French politician has not explicitly named a "preferable" candidate for US president, her comments today suggest it is not Hillary Clinton.

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Somewhere back in the depths of time the world got the idea that easy money — that is, low interest rates and high levels of government spending — would produce sustainable growth with modest but positive inflation. And for a while it seemed to work.