Europe

While the US political and financial establishment has been firmly opposed to a Trump presidency, an unexpected supporter for the presumptive GOP candidate has emerged in Russia, where the head of the Russian Upper House Committee for Foreign Relations, Konstantin Kosachev, said that a victory for Donald Trump in the US presidential elections would provide the "shake up" Washington needs and could be the catalyst to reverse the rapidly deteriorating trend in US-Russian relations.

Authored by StraightLineLogic's Robert Gore via The Burning Platform blog,

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

On July 1, 2005, the Chairman of then President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors told a reporter from CNBC that,

“We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s gonna drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.”

Submitted by Dmitry Orlov, The Saker, Victor Katsap and Evgenia Gurevich via PaulCraigRoberts.org,

Insouciant Americans do not even know what they should be worried about...

A Russian Warning

Via ConvergEx's Nick Colas,

Today we offer up five market counterfactuals – “What ifs” – to both illustrate why large cap U.S. equities just closed near their highest levels of 2016 and consider the conventional wisdom about whether the current rally is sustainable. 

 

Our home base: where asset prices and other trends started the year.