America

While North Korea managed to once again drop off the list of immediate geopolitical concerns having kept relative quiet in recent weeks, without any notable provocations or ICBM launches, this may be changing soon, because according to the Telegraph, America is drawing up plans for a “bloody nose” military attack on North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program. The UK newspaper's sources claim that the White House has “dramatically” stepped up preparation for a military solution in recent months amid fears diplomacy is not working.

While the jury will be out for years whether the Trump tax cuts will boost the economy (they already had an outsized impact on markets, pushing the Dow by nearly 5,000 points higher since Trump's election), there are several key problems that remain outstanding. The first one, as the following JPMorgan chart shows, is that all prior Republican tax cuts in US history took place when debt/GDP ratios were less than 40%.

Now that it is abundantly clear that for a stock to explode higher, all that is necessary - and sufficient - is a press release mentioning the company's name and throwing in the word "blockchain" in the same sentence (see Riot Blockchain and LongFin Corp), other public microcaps have decided that if that's all it takes, then by all means they will gladly take investors' money.

President Trump signed into law the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act on Tuesday, a $700 billion defense policy bill that mandates for a “briefing on cyber applications of blockchain technology.” Language within the bill is part of a much wider effort to modernize the United States military, before decades of hybrid wars breakout (see: US Army Is Preparing For Decades Of Hybrid Wars.)

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

What do we make of Trump’s national security speech?

First of all, it is the military/security complex’s speech, and it is inconsistent with Trump’s intention of normalizing relations with Russia.