Europe

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“As we begin 2017, the most urgent threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy,” writes William Galston of The Wall Street Journal, “it is illiberal democracy.”

Galston’s diagnosis is not wrong, and his alarm is not misplaced.

Yet why does America’s great export, liberal democracy, which appeared to be the future of the West if not of mankind at the Cold War’s end, now appear to be a church with a shrinking congregation?

Remember when back in April we showed a strange map of the Iranian oil tanker armada, which according to Windward data was storing as much as 50 million barrels offshore, yet which was just sitting on anchor going nowhere?

As a reminder, Iran has lacked sufficient land storage facilities to store its oil and, to enable it to keep pumping crude, has relied on its tanker fleet to park excess stocks until it can find buyers.

European shares fell modestly, Asian equities declined for the first day in three, and US equity futures were unchanged before the December U.S. nonfarm payrolls report. China’s offshore yuan fell the most in a year to pare a record weekly rally, while Mexico’s peso climbed after the central bank sold dollars. Oil was trading lower in early trading.

Submitted by Douglas Murray via The Gatestone Institute,

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Profits are faltering for structural reasons that are not easily resolved..

The bedrock assumption of the Bull market is that corporate profits will keep rising indefinitely. Hiccups are allowed, but current stock market valuations are implicitly based on profits expanding.