Submitted by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,
A report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has revealed that most of the world’s nations hiked their military budgets last year, marking the first increase in spending since the 2008 crisis.
It seems that the only ones not taking part in this military spending hike are some of the world’s biggest oil producers.
While the algos are focusing on where the next "OPEC freeze" headline (and subsequent rejection) will come from, Saudi Arabia is quietly creating a new alliance among the U.S. "reject" nations in the region.
Earlier today, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz at the Presidential Palace in Ankara on Tuesday. After an official welcoming ceremony, Erdogan presented the order of the State of the Republic of Turkey to the Saudi monarch. It is the Saudi king's first visit to Turkey since ascending the throne early last year.
David Rothkopf is pleased by the foreign policy implications of Hillary Clinton’s drearily inevitable victory in the fall:
For these reasons, it is not unreasonable to assume that the manic, funhouse-mirror qualities that have made campaign 2016 so memorable and, at times, deeply disturbing are likely to be followed in 2017 by America returning to the most traditionalist, solid, dependable, foreign policy it has seen since the administration of George H.W. Bush and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Nearly 6,000 refugee children were recorded as missing in Germany in 2015. A new report carried out by the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper stated this week that 5,835 unaccompanied refugee minors vanished in Germany last year with as many as 555 of them under the age of 14. The majority of unaccompanied minors were from Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea, Morocco and Algeria. Press TV reports: German Interior Ministry spokesman Johannes Dimroth confirmed media reports that the government had recently informed parliament about the disappearance of nearly 6,000 refugee children.
Total chaos reigns as equity market "participants" flip from manic-sellers (IMF un-growth and Italian sbank bailout failure) to panic-buyers after the following headline hits Bloomberg:
The nitial surge reaction...
Just a day after Algeria said Russia would not agree.