Business

Coming off the the "Thank Your Tour" that got started yesterday with stops in Indiana and Ohio, Vice President-Elect Mike Pence sat down with the Wall  Street Journal to discuss the new administration's aggressive plans for the first 100 days in office.  Pence said the new team plans for a "burst of activity" right out of the gate and said "the only thing that will surprise them is that Washington, D.C., is going to get an awful lot done in a short period of time."

A new ‘anti-Russian propaganda’ bill is to be signed into law which will make it illegal to run an alternative media website in the United States.  Under the guise of combatting “Russian propaganda,” the House of Representatives passed the H.R.6393 bill, also known as ‘Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017‘. The bill is an attempt to counteract “measures by Russia to exert covert influence” in America. Worryingly, the definition of what constitutes “Russian influence” includes references to so-called ‘fake news’ websites and any site deemed anti-establishment.

Submitted by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,

If anyone is cheering the news of an OPEC deal it is U.S. shale producers. The OPEC agreement sent oil prices shooting up this week, with WTI and Brent quickly surging above $50 per barrel.

In years to come markets may well look back at the month just passed as one of the most pivotal in recent memory, at least that's the assessment of DB's Jim Reid. The US election result just over 3 weeks ago sparked a huge divergence across asset classes and also between developed and emerging markets. In fact you could probably start this performance review from November 8th as assets were generally little changed in the first week and a bit leading into the election.

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

During the past year, the Chinese yuan (CNY) has shed a bit more than 7 percent of its value against the greenback. That’s only one aspect of the CNY’s weakness. Another concerns the quality of the CNY.

As Jerry Jordan pointed out recently at the Cato Institute’s 34th Annual Monetary Conference, a central bank is a balance sheet. Among other things, the People’s Bank of China’s balance sheet contains information that indicates the quality of the CNY.