Business

Submitted by Daniel Mitchell via The Foundation for Economic Education,

Early last month, in a column on my hopes and fears for 2017, I fretted about fiscal chaos in Italy leading to default and bailouts.

Simply stated, I fear that Italy, along with certain other “Club Med” nations, has passed the point of no return in terms of big government, demographic decline, and societal dependency.

And this means that, sooner or later, the proverbial wheels are going to fall off the bus. And it might be sooner.

Submitted by Saxo Group's Jack Davies, via TradingFloor.com,

Submitted by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

The latest GDP numbers from the World Bank were released earlier this month, and today’s visualization from HowMuch.net breaks them down to show the relative share of the global economy for each country.

As Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins explains, the full circle, known as a Voronoi Diagram, represents the entirety of the $74 trillion global economy in nominal terms. Meanwhile, each country’s segment is sized accordingly to their percentage of global GDP output. Continents are also grouped together and sorted by color.

Billionaire globalist George Soros has hedged a $500 million dollar bet on the U.S. economy failing and corporations becoming bankrupt.  According to Soros, companies that benefit from the policies of President Donald Trump will be “financially ruined” in the months ahead. The billionaire is a vocal critic against Donald Trump, and was recently outed as being the main financier behind anti-Trump riots across America. Newsmax.com reports: Soros’ bets against stocks came in the form of puts, or options to sell, on two exchange-traded funds that track broad market indexes, CNBC reported.