British prime minister David Cameron has come under renewed pressure to reveal details of possible UK military action in Libya after it emerged that a number of British special forces troops had already been operating in the country since January. EU ministers are holding a special meeting on Monday evening to discuss sending police and border forces to the North African country. The British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond also paid an apparent unannounced visit to Tripoli in a show of support for the country’s new UN-backed government.

Was it ever in doubt?

Oh just one thing...

Earnings expectations have plunged over 6% since the last time The Dow was here.

Chart: Bloomberg

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in an interview with Sara Eisen that quantitative easing did what it was supposed to do, which was to inflate stock prices and drive multiple expansion.

He was confused as to why things such as corporate earnings, capital spending, and productivity have declined given how much QE was pumped into the system. The answer to the riddle of course, is that QE was never intended to help fix anything fundamentally, it was as Kyle Bass said recently, simply a mechanism to transfer wealth and make the rich richer.

Headlines that have recently hit the media say that the Saudis are threatening to sell off assets worth  hundreds of billions of US dollars if the congress passes the 9/11 report. But according to a report by Moon of Alabama, it is not the Saudis who are making threats, it’s actually congress who are threatening to seize Saudi U.S. assets: It is the U.S. Congress that is threatening to lift the immunity of nation states in front of U.S.

Richard Gamble reviews John Wilsey’s American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion, and finds Wilsey’s version of exceptionalism to be dangerous in its own way: