presidential election

US index futures are unchanged, having recovered virtually all overnight session losses alongside the EURUSD following Merkel's failure to form a government, while European shares rise despite Angela Merkel's failure to form a new government. In the span of just hours, the goalseeked "hot take" consensus was that Germany’s collapsed coalition talks aren’t expected be a deal breaker for European equities due to the "strength of the German economy."

The mainstream media is a fickle beast beholden to the direction of the prevailing political winds. Unfortunately for Facebook, Google and Twitter, those winds have turned about face in recent weeks as the political establishment thrashes about in its misguided efforts to prove that – aided by social media - Russia changed the course of the 2016 presidential election. While Facebook’s share price has suffered very little so far, the mainstream media is going to work on the reputations of Facebook and its billionaire founder.

Who Gets to Push the Nuclear Button?

Paul Craig Roberts

it has been a rocky session for the dollar which has dumped to a 4-week low, dragging with it USDJPY, the Nikkei and Treasury yields - and to a lesser extend US equity futures - all of which have slumped in the Japanese am session, following a WSJ report that Robert Mueller’s team "caught the Trump campaign by surprise" in mid-October by issuing a document subpoena to more than a dozen top officials.

In a moment of rare insight, two weeks ago in response to a question "Why is establishment media romanticizing communism? Authoritarianism, poverty, starvation, secret police, murder, mass incarceration? WTF?", we said that this was simply a "prelude to central bank funded universal income", or in other words, Fed-funded and guaranteed cash for everyone.

prelude to central bank funded universal income

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 31, 2017