America

"One man alone cannot make 'America great again'. That you have to realize," warns Marc Faber, the editor of "The Gloom, Boom, & Doom Report," reminding the world that the US stock market is vulnerable to a seismic sell-off that won't be caused by any single catalyst. His argument: Stocks are very overbought and sentiment is way too bullish for the so-called Trump rally to continue.

http://player.cnbc.com/p/gZWlPC/cnbc_global

The Resurrection of Armageddon

Paul Craig Roberts

“The U.S. intelligence community’s extraordinary campaign of leaks claiming improper ties between President Trump’s team and Russia seeks to ensure a lucrative New Cold War by blocking detente.” — Gareth Porter

It appears that taking a scripted show in which overpaid millionaires pat each other on the back, while turning it into a platform to voice their coordinated political grievances and lash out against the elected choice of a plurality of America's voters may not have been the best idea to boost viewership: according to Nielsen, the 89th Annual Academy Awards brought in an average of 32.9 million viewers on Sunday night. According to ABC, that was the second lowest viewership in Oscar history and is down from the 2016 broadcast, which brought in 34 million viewers.

The scramble for America's bottom dollar is on, and according to a troubling report by Reuters it has prompted America's largest low-cost retailer Wal-Mart to not only cut prices, but to squeeze suppliers in a stealthy war for market share and maximizing profits, a scramble for market share which is oddly reminiscent of the OPEC 2014 price fiasco and is certain to unleash a deflationary shock across wide portions of the US economy.

Via Howard Kunstler of Kunstler.com,

We need a new civil war like we need a hole in the head. But that’s just it: America has a hole in its head. It’s the place formerly known as The Center. It didn’t hold. It was the place where people of differing views could rely on each other to behave reasonably around a touchstone called the National Interest. That abandoned place is now cordoned off, a Chernobyl of the mind, where figures on each side of the political margin fear to even sojourn, let alone occupy, lest they go radioactive.