Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,
Many readers are familiar with the original petrodollar deal the U.S made with Saudi Arabia.
It was set up by Henry Kissinger and Saudi princes in 1974 to prop up the U.S. dollar. At the time, confidence in the dollar was on shaky ground because President Nixon had ended gold convertibility of dollars in 1971.
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
The gunfire on the streets near my hotel started around 9pm last night.
The sound is unmistakable, especially at night on an otherwise quiet city street.
I had recently returned to the hotel after a few evening meetings. And coming back after dark it was as if they had rolled the sidewalks up — restaurants with no patrons, bars and clubs that were totally empty.
Since the financial crisis, most market observers and economists have cheerfully ignored the aggregate student-debt load in the US, which recently swelled to an economy-threatening $1.4 trillion. Even as student-debt, which can't be discharged in bankruptcy, grew to represent 10% of the total US debt burden, defenders of the status quo pointed to declining default rates as evidence that the government-backed student loan industry wasn’t in danger of imploding.
But that may soon change.
From his small suburban home in Basingstoke, just west of London, Jay Smith - the No. 1 cryptocurrency trader at online brokerage eToro - looks for reasons to buy more bitcoin and other digital tokens.
The 29-year-old high school dropout and one-time professional video-game player doesn't mind the volatility, as Bloomberg reports, his portfolio is up 295 percent in the past 12 months... "I just put in an order for a Tesla, and I don’t even know how to drive..."
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Japan is a global leader is how to gracefully manage stagnation.
Although our leadership is too polite to say it out loud, they've embraced stagnation as the new quasi-official policy. The reason is tragi-comically obvious: any real reform would threaten the income streams gushing into untouchably powerful self-serving elites and fiefdoms.