Europe

MODERN JUGGERNAUTS LIKE APPLE DON’T EVEN COME CLOSE

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

Before speculative bubbles could form around Dotcom companies (late-1990s) or housing prices (mid-2000s), Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes that some of the first financial bubbles formed from the prospect of trading with faraway lands.

Looking back, it’s pretty easy to see why.

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

Everywhere, it seems like officials are actively preparing for the possibility of nuclear war.

Tensions are high in practically every corner of the world but somehow, despite the proliferation of imminent threats, many people are still blithely unaware of the hell that could be unleashed.

Authored by Federico Pieraccini of Strategic Culture

The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), by lending out money using an alternative currency to the dollar, opens up huge spaces for investment and the strategic transformation of the region.

Sanctions, schmanctions...

After imposing various sanctions for whatever the neocon establishment can make up next, Washington must be shocked to see that their economic warmongery agains Russia has led to... lower and lower bond yields.

Russian five-year bond yields dropped to the lowest level since January 2014, even as Bloomberg reports that the U.S. Treasury prepares a report on the possible effect of sanctioning the nation’s sovereign debt.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The hidden agenda in the so-called tax reform bill is to act as stop-gap quantitative easing to plug the “liquidity” hole that is opening up as the Federal Reserve (America’s central bank) makes a few gestures to winding down its balance sheet and “normalizing” interest rates. Thus, the aim of the tax bill is to prop up capital markets, and the apprehension of this lately is what keeps stocks making daily record highs. Okay, sorry, a lot to unpack there.