The value of the crude oil production alone is worth a staggering $1.7 trillion each year. Add downstream fuels and other services to that, and oil is a money-making machine. As VisualCapitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, both companies and governments take advantage of this resource wealth. More of the world’s largest companies work in the oil patch than any other industry. At the same, entire government regimes are kept intact thanks to oil revenues.
With the entire world's focused on the last remaining reflationary dynamo in the world, China, today's inflation data out of Beijing, fabricated as it may be, was closely watched. After all, just one month ago, UBS declared China's reflationary phase over, and a dark, deflationary era of negative credit impulse-driven deflation would soon be unleashed on the world. Again.
It wasn't quite so dramatic.
Authored by Craig Wilson via The Daily Reckoning blog,
David Stockman joined Greg Hunter of USA Watchdog to discuss what he views as a fiscal bloodbath and the biggest bond market bubble to ever hit the global economy.
To begin the discussion, the Washington insider was asked about the cash on hand in the United States federal budget and the fiscal conditions that Donald Trump faced where he unloaded, “I think it is a total calamity. They capitulated entirely.”
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
I’m fairly certain very few of you have heard of broker price opinions, or BPOs, but it’s something I think we should all become aware of given the influence of BPOs in the market for valuing residential real estate securitized bonds.
A fascinating, recent report by the Devonshire Research Group, whose recent work on Tesla was featured here one year ago, has moved beyond the micro and tackled on of the most controversial macroeconomic topic possible: what is the true rate of inflation. What it finds is that, like others before it most notably Shadowstats and Chapwood, the accepted definition of inflation, or CPI, is dramatically understated for various reasons, both political and economic.