Europe

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

In numerous interviews and articles, including my essay 'Globalist Strategy: Use Crazy Leftists And Provocateurs To Enrage/Demonize Conservatives', I have warned leftists that they are being exploited by globalists as a means to drive conservatives towards greater centralization under Trump and the federal government and that if they continue on the path they have embraced, a totalitarian response may be imminent.

Authored by Richard Ebeling via The Mises Institute,

Politically we seem to be living in some trying times. The political polarization, as captured in the mainstream news media, appears to be intensifying with even acts of destructive violence on the streets and campuses of American cities. At the same time, pictures out of Houston during and following Hurricane Harvey show empathetic assistance and cooperation between people and groups that supposedly are in heated contention with each other. How do we reconcile this?

Ugly jobs data (hopefully transitory), uglier energy industry data, and ugliest comments from Trump on throwing away any fiscal restraint with the debt-ceiling bathwater left the dollar down, stocks lower, and bonds and bullion bid...

After laying waste to much of the Leeward Islands and leaving most of Puerto Rico without power, Hurricane Irma is continuing its destructive march through the Caribbean which is expected to culminate with landfall in Miami sometime this weekend.

As we noted yesterday, Irma's catastrophic 185+ mph winds left 90% of the dwellings on the island of Barbuda completely leveled, according to Prime Minister Gaston Browne.

S&P futures are flat, still spooked by the WSJ's report that Gary Cohn will not be the next Fed chair, while both European stocks and Asian shares gain in a overnight session on edge in which everyone is looking forward to today's main risk event: the ECB meeting and Draghi press conference due in under two hours. The dollar continued to weaken against most G-10 peers as tensions over North Korea, concerns over Stan Fischer's resignation and the increasingly cloudy Fed outlook outweighed positive sentiment from the US debt ceiling extension.