Asia

After meandering steadily higher for the past week, and completely ignoring the negative newsflow out of the Doha meeting, today oil took an unexpected leg lower to 4-day lows, leaving many stumped: what caused this drop?

The answer, according to Citi, is the realization Saudi Arabia is actually making good on its threat to boost production (recall that just one day ahead of Doha, Saudi deputy crown prince bin Salman said he could add a million barrels immediately) something we noted a month ago in "Why Saudi Arabia Has No Intention To End The Oil Glut."

From the supporters of Donald Trump to the street protesters of southern Europe, voters around the world are mad as hell. Inequality, immigration, and the establishment's perceived indifference are firing up electorates in a way that's rarely been seen before. As the following charts from Bloomberg show, the forces shaping the disruption of global politics have been building for years and aren't about to diminish...

The world's middle classes are getting poorer

Submitted by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

• The European Union now finds itself in a classic catch-22 situation. Large numbers of Muslim migrants will flow to Europe regardless of whether or not the EU approves the visa waiver for Turkey.

Given the fact that a snowball has a better chance in hell than the American public ever seeing a transcript of Hillary Clinton's various million-dollar speeches to Goldman Sachs employees, K.J. Noh, Counterpunch's resident satirist in chief, unleashes his best guess at what was said.. and if not, what was implied... Liberty Blitzkrieg's Mike Krieger excerpts the true meaning of Clinton:

There is little joy for bulls in David Kostin's latest weekly kickstart, in which the chief Goldman strategist says that "the S&P 500 has reached our 2016 year-end target of 2100. We expect that the index will remain at this level given tepid US GDP growth, a mixed earnings outlook, and elevated valuation. Corporate repurchases are the main source of US equity demand. We forecast S&P 500 gross buybacks will rise by 7% to $600 billion in 2016.