Business

Following yesterday's OPEC "production freeze" meeting in Doha which ended in total failure, where in a seemingly last minute change of heart Saudi Arabia and specifically its deputy crown prince bin Salman revised the terms of the agreement demanding Iran participate in the freeze after all knowing well it won't, oil crashed and with it so did the strategy of jawboning for the past 2 months had been exposed for what it was: a desperate attempt to keep oil prices stable and "crush shorts" while global demand slowly picked up.

The full article can be downloaded as PDF here.

Introduction

by Ron Paul

This week, President Obama and Vice President Biden held a hastily arranged secret meeting with Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen. According to the one paragraph statement released by the White House following the meeting, Yellen, Obama, and Biden simply “exchanged notes” about the economy and the progress of financial reform. Because the meeting was held behind closed doors, the American people have no way of knowing what else the three might have discussed.

Today, credit cards are one of the most important sources of big bank profits. However, a look at the history of credit cards shows that things weren’t always that way.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/125349833

Now that the next and final phase of unorthodox monetary policy, i.e., helicopter money, has had the blessing of both Mario Draghi and Ben Bernanke, and is virtually assured, there are three questions: how to trade it; where will it be implemented first (and certainly not last), and how will it all end.

We covered the first part, how to trade it, late on Friday, courtesy of a Deutsche Bank report titled, don't laugh, "Helicopters 101: your guide to monetary financing"