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There have been signs since October’s Party Congress that China’s infrastructure boom was about to cool off as the leadership seeks to contain debt levels and focus on the quality not the quantity of growth. Subway building is one sector which has seen some high-profile project cancellations. In mid-November 2017, Caixin reported that China’s top economic planning authority, the National Development and Reform Commission, was “raising the bar for subway proposals” – increasing scrutiny in terms of fiscal conditions, population and GDP.

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

I deplore the tax cut that has passed Congress. It is not an economic policy tax cut, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with supply-side economics. The entire purpose is to raise equity prices by providing equity owners with more capital gains and dividends.

After slowing down fractionally in its relentless ascent after topping $11,000 for the first time less than a week ago, Bitcoin has brushed off the weekend selloff and on Wednesday morning (Asian time) exploded higher following a renewed burst of buying out of the usual Asian suspect exchanges - and Bitfinex - surging above $12,000 for the first time ever, and trading at a new all time high of $12,200 at publication time.

For those keeping track, this is how long it has taken the cryptocurrency to cross the key psychological levels:

The US Dollar is down over 9% year-to-date against a broad basket of the world's fiat currencies, tumbled over 10% against gold, and has collapsed against Bitcoin; but, as Bloomberg's Garfield Reynolds warns, the dollar's worst year since 2003 is about to get "even grimmer" in 2018...

Via Bloomberg,

The one point of clarity coming out of Washington is that tax reform isn’t about to save the dollar where Fed rate hikes have failed.

Authored by Patrick Watson via MauldinEconomics.com,

According to the more cynical pundits, government programs usually achieve the opposite of their intended goal. And sometimes they do.

For example, Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs” is still in progress, but the drugs are definitely winning.