America

Authored by Jake Anderson via TheAntiMedia.org,

Authored by Joey Clark via TheAntiMedia.org,

Taking to the Senate floor Tuesday under a veil of earnest hyperbole common among those who fall under the “geriatric” label, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York uttered a plea to his Senate colleagues.

“The country is being tested in unprecedented ways,” Senator Schumer said. “I say to all of my colleagues in the Senate: History is watching.”

There was some good news and some not so good news in the Fed's latest annual Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households.

First the good news.

When all other sources of economic growth appear tapped out, there is always the military-industrial complex coming to the rescue of US GDP with the sale of arms and equipment to the world's biggest purchaser of weapons: Saudi Arabia. Because when one looks beyond the pageantry, pomp and circumstance of Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia, the main purpose behind the president's visit is precisely that: selling weapons, some $350 billion over the next decade, according to estimates.

Back in 2006, some of the wall street banks (ahem, Goldman) managed to layoff quite a bit of their mortgage risk to unwitting European and Asian investors who, in their desperate 'search for yield', had no idea they had just been conned into stepping in front of a freight train.  Now, it seems that the same thing may be happening yet again with another favorite wall street structured product, Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs).