Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
In this world, it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, said Henry Kissinger in 1968, but to be a friend is fatal.
The South Vietnamese would come to appreciate the insight.
So it is today with Aleppo, where savage reprisals against U.S.-backed rebels are taking place in that hellhole of human rights.
Yet, again, the wrong lessons are being drawn from the disaster.
Quad-witching Friday has arrived, which means that alongside thin, pre-holiday liquidity and a jumpy market, we expect to see sharp, volatile moves for the rest of the day, the first of which was just noted in Europe, where stocks moved from session lows to highs in the span of minutes, in the process sending the Euro Stoxx 50 index 0.8% higher and turning it positive on the year as it reached its highest level since December 2015. The broader Stoxx 600 remains still down 1.8% on the year.
Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
Rates Are Rising Because Of China, Not Inflation
On the heels of last night's big crude build, OPEC's overnight report stating that supply cuts won’t re-balance the market until the second half of 2017 has sparked further losses in oil prices, almost erasing the entire OPEC/NOPEC/Saudi cut ramp.
As Bloomberg reports, OPEC said its agreement to cut production, while speeding up the re-balancing of the global oil market, won’t result in demand exceeding supply until the second half of next year.
Submitted by Koos Jansen, BullionStar.com.