Europe

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

As Our Past Wars Are Glorified This Memorial Day Weekend, Give Some Thought To Our Prospects Against The Russians And Chinese In World War III

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

In a misguided and desperate attempt to fight the headwinds of deflation (a byproduct ofunsustainable debt which the market has been trying to unwind for the past decade), central bankers have manipulated markets with a range of tools. This ranges from a lot of preposterous jawboning to quantitative easing and slashing interest rates all the way down to levels never experienced before.

Following the May 12 launch of "Aegis Ashore", the operational name of Washington's European missile defense system based in Romania, which overnight swept away the tentative European nuclear arms race balance of power as it removed a Russian "first strike threat" thereby pressuring Russia to implement further nuclear offensive and defensive measures, Putin was livid, and as we reported yesterday, during his press conference with Greek PM Tsipras, the Russian president explicitly warned Poland and Romania that they are now in Russian first-strike crosshairs, and that Russia's most likely re

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

It’s unclear what China was thinking when it borrowed all those trillions to quadruple its capacity to make steel, cement and other basic industrial products. There’s no record of it checking in with the other countries that have such industries to see if a sudden surge of cheap imports was okay with them.

Turns out that it’s not. The US in particular seems to lack a sense of humor where the death of its steel industry is involved:

Three separate shipwrecks in the Mediterranean in the last week are thought to have claimed the lives of more than 700 people who were trying to reach Europe, according to the UN’s refuge agency. The incidents happened on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday after thousands set sail from Libya for Italy in an eight-day period. Carlotta Sami, a spokeswoman for UNHCR, told AP on Sunday that an estimated 100 people were missing from a smugglers’ boat which capsized Wednesday.