Business

On December 1, Puerto Rico governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla was staring down a $354 million debt payment he couldn’t make.

If the commonwealth defaulted on the GO portion, a cascade of messy litigation would follow and the island’s reputation with creditors would suffer irreparable harm.

That afternoon, on the heels of a visit to Capitol Hill where the governor attempted to explain to Congress why Puerto Rico should be allowed to take advantage of bankruptcy laws, the island made the payment, avoiding default.

It may be Saturday, but there is no rest for the onslaught of negative data from China, which overnight reported the latest, December, consumer and producer price inflation numbers, with the former printing at 1.6% Y/Y, matching consensus estimates, and a tiny increase from the 1.5% in November: the rebound was largely due to one-time items. For all of 2015, CPI rose 1.4%, the slowest annual increase since 2009 and well below Beijing's goal of keeping last year's inflation below 3%. In 2014, CPI rose 2.0%.

We’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past 12 months documenting the trainwreck that is Alberta’s economy.

Most recently, we brought you "This Is Canada's Depression: Surging Crime, Soaring Suicides, Overwhelmed Food Banks" and "For Canadian Repo Men, Business Has Never Been Better", but you can review the story in its entirety by revisiting the following posts:

Another Fabricated Jobs Report

Paul Craig Roberts

According to Friday’s (January 8) payroll jobs numbers, almost 300,000 new jobs were created in December. Additionally, the previous two months were revised upward by 50,000 jobs. Apparently, the equity market did not believe the report, with the averages moving down today.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

This week I am addressing themes I see playing out in 2016.