America

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.

Via Disobedient Media

Traders are on edge ahead of tomorrow's key address by President Trump to Congress, in which as Bloomberg writes "trillions are at stake."

Since Trump’s election, the S&P 500 has risen by 10%, posting 17 record closes in a rally that’s added $2.8 trillion in value to the U.S. equity market, with economists divided on how much of the rally is due to hopes from Trump's pro-growth promises, how much due to corporate earnings growth (which are expected to rise 12% from last year's energy-depressed levels), and how much due to the organic growth of the economy.