Russia Gold Rush Sees Record Reserves For Putin Era
by Yuliya Fedorinova of Bloomberg via Irish Indepedent
Vladimir Putin is doing his part to keep the upswing in gold alive.
Since the Russian president went on a geopolitical offensive in Ukraine in 2014, the haven asset had its first annual gain in four years in 2016 and is on track for another in 2017.
U.K. leisure carrier Monarch Airlines filed for insolvency on Monday, the biggest ever failure of a British airline, stranding tens of thousands of travellers overseas and prompting the country’s biggest-ever peacetime repatriation effort, as the government has to find a way to to arrange the return of 110,000 tourists, and marking the third failure of a major European operator in five months. Monarch cancelled about 300,000 future bookings and apologized to customers and staff as it became the UK’s largest carrier to go into administration, according to Reuters.
While S&P futures were modestly higher, rising 0.1% in a quiet session in which China, South Korea, India and Hong Kong were closed for holidays, the Euro, Spanish stocks and bonds were broadly lower as Spain faces its worst constitutional crisis in years following a dramatic, violent crackdown on Sunday's Catalan independence referendum in which 89% of the voters wanted to secede from Spain.
After the quietest September in history for U.S. stocks...
Things may about to get a little more exciting - entering the final months of 2017, that last digit doesn’t bode well, if history is any indication.
As Bloomberg reports, some of the biggest fourth-quarter declines in the Dow Jones Industrial Average have occurred in years ending in seven, the worst being in a Black-Monday plagued 1987.
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Do the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors read their own newspaper?
The frontpage headline story for the Labor Day weekend was “Low Wage Growth Challenges Fed.” Despite an alleged 4.4% unemployment rate, which is full employment, there is no real growth in wages. The front page story pointed out correctly that an economy alleged to be expanding at full employment, but absent any wage growth or inflation, is “a puzzle that complicates Federal Reserve policy decisions.”