America

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

If integrity means more than any of these baubles, then prepare to fail.

The theme this week is The Rot Within.

Update: as previewed earlier, Sprott announced that at the request of the Board of Directors and Sprott management, Marc Faber has resigned as a director of the Company effective immediately.

As the mainstream media continues to obsess over $100,000 worth Facebook ads allegedly purchased by Russian spies in 2016 seeking to throw the presidential election, we're almost certain they'll ignore the much larger Russian bombshell dropped today in the form of newly released FBI documents that reveal for the very first time that the Obama administration was well aware of illegal bribery, extortion and money laundering schemes being conducted by the Russians to get a foothold in the atomic energy business in the U.S.

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Central bankers have never done more damage to the world economy than in the past 10 years. One may argue this is because they never had the power to do that. If their predecessors had had that power, who knows? Still, the global economy has never been more interconnected than it is today, due mostly to the advance of globalism, neoliberalism and perhaps even more, technology.

Authord by Chris Whalen via The Institutional Risk Analyst,

Almost as soon as it started, the excitement surrounding earnings for financials in Q3 2017 dissipated like air leaving a balloon.

Source: HedgeEye

Results for the largest banks – including JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM), Citigroup (NYSE:C) and Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) – all universally disappointed, even based upon the admittedly modest expectations of the Sell Side analyst cohort.