Business

Authored by David Stockman via The Daily Reckoning,

You have to hand it to the Donald. He speaks his mind. This week he dropped an unwelcome stink bomb on Capitol Hill during his Phoenix rant Tuesday night. If Mexico won’t pay for my wall, he seemed to say, than Congress will—-even if I have to shutdown the Imperial City to extract the first $1.6 billion of seed money:

“We’re going to get our wall,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Phoenix. “If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.”

In this week's MacroVoices podcast, Erik Townsend and Joe McMonigle, former chief of staff at the US Department of Energy, discuss the state of the global energy market, and OPEC’s rapidly diminishing ability to control oil prices. McMonigle believes investors will be hearing more jawboning from the Saudis, OPEC's de-facto leader, over the next two weeks as they try to marshal support for extending the cartel's production-cut agreement past a March 2018 deadline.

Authored by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,

My friend James Montier, now at GMO, and his associate Matt Kadnar have written a compelling piece on why passive investors should avoid the S&P 500.

Their essay argues that the forward growth potential of the S&P 500 is significantly lower than that of other opportunities, especially emerging markets.

Let’s look at a few of their charts.

So, what do you do when your sales are stalling because you've already financed new cars for every man, woman and child with a credit score north of 500?  Well, you simply abandon credit scores in the underwriting process and instead explicitly mandate that your loan officers approve every potential car buyer that walks through the door with a pulse. 

Authored by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

Energy is everything. 

This is an amazingly important concept. Yet it's almost universally overlooked.