North Korea

Authored by Dave Majumdar via The National Interest,

"It is time to think about the unthinkable..."

The standoff between the United States and North Korea continues to escalate with neither side willing to back down.

With each passing day, the possibility of open warfare breaking out seems to increase as each side ups the ante. Indeed, President Donald Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric in recent days—seemingly threatening to launch a nuclear first strike against North Korea.

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

After a week on vacation, I got the joy of coming back to an Administration threatening North Korea over nuclear weapons.

Now, you would suspect the possibility of nuclear war might just be the catalyst to send markets reeling, but looking at the market’s reaction on Thursday, I suspect there will be t-shirts soon reading:

Nothing too exciting here, just the 4th consecutive day of verbal escalations between the US and North Korea, this time from Donald Trump who as expected responded to this mornings statement from North Korea, that Pyongyang "can reduce the US to ashes at any moment", saying he meant what he said about the U.S. military being "locked and loaded" in response to threats from North Korea.

With markets about to close for the next 2 days, the question on every trader's mind is: "should i carry risk over the weekend, or should I dump it all in case North Korea fires another test, or non-test, ICBM launch which may be just the provocation Trump needs to give the green light to a squadron of B-1 bombers to begin a bombing campaign." After all, Trump himself tweeted this morning that "military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!" 

In a glimmer of hope that a military conclusion to the North Korean crisis may yet be averted, Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that "Russia does not accept a North Korea that possesses nuclear weapons", cautioned that there is an "overwhelming amount of over-the-top belligerent rhetoric on North Korea’s nuclear and rocket programs from Washington and Pyongyang", but most importantly said that there is a joint Russian-Chinese plan to defuse the North Korean crisis, according to which North Korea would freeze its missile tests, while the US and South Korea would stop larg