America

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity,

Audit the Fed recently took a step closer to becoming law, when it was favorably reported by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This means the House could vote on the bill at any time. The bill passed by voice vote without any objections, although Fed defenders did launch hysterical attacks on the bill during the debate as well as at a hearing on the bill the previous week.

For months now we've been warning that the great auto 'plateau' is nothing more than a debt-fueled bubble, courtesy of the Fed, that is on the verge of collapse.  Of course, bubbles typically get exposed when customer sell-through starts to slow but OEM's go on believing that 10% volume growth is possible in perpetuity...that usually results in inventory growth that looks something like this:

Authored by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Authored by David Stockman via The Daily Reckoning blog,

In honor of the Donald’s “Mother of All Bomb” (MOAB) attack on the Hindu Kush mountains Thursday, let me introduce MOAD.

I’m referring to the “Mother of All Debt” crises, of course. The opening round is coming when Washington goes into shutdown mode on April 28, which happens to be Day 100 of the Donald’s reign.

Last quarter investors forgot the negative cash-flow, forgot the soaring cost of content, forgot the rampant competition, and forgot fact that Netflix slashed its domestic subscriber growth expectations, and just bought-the-f##king-record-high because international subscriber growth soared. This quarter, however, they may be less gullible because that surge in international subscribers not only did not happen, but missed by a whopping 370K subs, missing both the street forecast of 3.9 million and the company's own guidance of 3.7 million.