Europe

Over the next three weeks, the investing world will shift its attention away from the endless chatter of central bankers and concerns about the state of the economy, and instead focus on second quarter earning season, which launched on Friday with results from the three biggest US banks which showed that chronically low volatility is anything but good for trading revenues (as Jamie Dimon made all too clear in a bizarre Friday rant). As previewed last week, and is the norm, we get most of the US numbers first, followed by Europe and then Japan.

Authored by EconomicPrism's MN Gordon, annotated by Acting-Man's Pater Tenebrarum,

Flowing Toward the Great Depression

All remaining doubts concerning the place the U.S. economy and its tangled web of international credits and debts is headed were clarified this week. On Monday, Mark Yusko, CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management, told CNBC that:

Authored by Pepe Escobar via Asia Times,

China and Syria have already begun discussing post-war infrastructure investment; with a 'Matchmaking Fair for Syria Reconstruction' held in Beijing

Amid the proverbial doom and gloom pervading all things Syria, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune sometimes yield, well, good fortune.

A longtime Republican operative from Chicago’s North Shore who was at the center of a confusing Wall Street Journal story involving shadowy Russian hackers and Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails committed suicide, according to the Chicago Tribune. Peter W. Smith, 81, a former private equity executive and longtime political operative, killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room days after telling his story to a reporter from WSJ, according to the Chicago Tribune.

HSBC has a shaky relationship with regulators. 

Back in 2012, the bank admitted that it helped Mexican drug cartels launder money and did business with Iran and other sanctioned nations. To avoid charges, it signed a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with the U.S. Department of Justice which required it to improve its internal controls and submit to an outside monitor.