America

All the latest moves coming from Jeff Sessions would seem to imply that the beleaguered Attorney General has every intent of aggressively pushing forward with Trump's agenda in order to mend broken fences with the White House and try to keep his job.  The latest such move comes in the form of the following rather direct official statement from Sessions in response to Chicago's lawsuit filed earlier this morning regarding federal funding, or lack thereof rather, for sanctuary cities.

Now that ISIS - the perpetual scapegoat for US intervention in the Syrian proxy war - is no longer viable, with the Qatar, Saudi-funded and Pentagon-equipped terrorist organization scattered and on the run, and there is no longer an imperative to remove Assad from power as the Qatar natgas pipeline to Europe is mothballed indefinitely while Russia and Iran are the de facto undisputed rulers of Syria, it is time to focus popular anger against ISIS elsewhere... like in the Philippines.  And not wasting any time, NBC reports that the Pentagon is considering a plan allowing the U.S.

Several days after Paul Singer released his much anticipated letter to investors (key excerpts here), the founder of Elliott Management was profiled on Bloomberg as the "most feared activist investor in the world—by hedge fund rivals, companies and even countries", and for good reason.

When it comes to inflation in the US, there are generally two schools of thought:one is that inflation is woefully - and purposefully for political means - mismeasured, and that the real inflation is orders of magnitude higher than what the BLS, with its endless array of hedonic adjustments, reports. We discussed this view in May when we presented a presentation by Devonshire Research, which showed that "contrarian" CPI is closer to 8%, not the "post-modern" accepted rate of roughly 3%.

Authored by Robert Shiller, originally posted op-ed at The New York Times,

The Transformation of the ‘American Dream’

“The American Dream is back.” President Trump made that claim in a speech in January.

They are ringing words, but what do they mean? Language is important, but it can be slippery. Consider that the phrase, the American Dream, has changed radically through the years.