America

Via Kevin Muir of The Macro Tourist blog,

Although the market is convinced the Federal Reserve will get aggressive with their rate hikes, I am not sure market participants have thought this through. Let’s not forget the Federal Reserve is sitting on the largest balance sheet in history.

This portfolio is the result of years of Quantitative Easing. It was made riskier with the Fed’s “Operation Twist” that extended the duration of their balance sheet by buying long dated securities while selling shorter ones.

As discussed earlier, the Obamacare repeal and replace effort, derisively called by some either "Obamacare Lite", "RyanCare", "ObamaCare 2.0",  and even Trumpcare". is running into major hurdles as prominent consevative groups threaten to derail Trump's broader economic agenda.

Via Ben Hunt of Salient Partners' Epsilon Theory blog,

If the plunge in gas prices was "unequivocally good" for Americans' pocketbooks, then we wonder what the PhDs will make of the fact that California gas prices just broke above $3 for the first time since 2015 - soaring at 28% YoY (the fastest since Q1 2011, which sparked a plunge in economic growth).

California gasoline prices at 20 month highs...

There's just one problem with the "unequivocal" arguments - the last time gas prices soared at this pace, GDP growth in America plunged...

While it has been superficially covered by much of the press - and one can make the argument that what Julian Assange has revealed is more relevant to the US population, than constant and so far unconfirmed speculation that Trump is a puppet of Putin - the fallout from the Wikileaks' "Vault 7" release this morning of thousands of documents demonstrating the extent to which the CIA uses backdoors to hack smartphones, computer operating systems, messenger applications and internet-connected televisions, will be profound.