Europe

President Barack Obama has indirectly attacked Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, saying he knows very little about foreign policy  and not much when it comes to “the world generally.” Obama was referring to Trump’s latest proposal to arm Japan and South Korea with their own nuclear weapons to fight it out with North Korea and China themselves. Trump believes America is not a great nation any longer and needs to sit it out and count the pennies while the rest of the world sort out their own problems, including nuclear proliferation and such other important worldly matters.

Via InternationalMan.com,

(This is Doug Casey’s foreword to Casey Research’s Handbook for Surviving the Coming Financial Crisis.)

Right now, we are exiting the eye of the giant financial hurricane that we entered in 2007, and we’re going into its trailing edge.

It’s going to be much more severe, different, and longer lasting than what we saw in 2008 and 2009.

Submitted by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

The U.S. military are going to deploy thousands of troops to the Russian border in an effort to protect NATO’s eastern borders from “aggressive Russia”. Around 4,500 soldiers armed with 250 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Paladin self-propelled howitzers, and over 1,700 vehicles will station themselves at the border in the biggest deployment of its kind since the end of the Cold War. Vice News reports: They will conduct military exercises across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, according to a statement from US European Command.

Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum via Acting-Man.com,

Reader Questions on Negative Interest Rates

Our reader L from Mumbai has mailed us a number of questions about the negative interest rate regime and its possible consequences. Since these questions are probably of general interest, we have decided to reply to them in this post.

The NIRP club – negative central bank deposit rates – click to enlarge.