United States

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne)), via SHTFPlan.com,

As a natural consequence of the Manhattan luxury real-estate slowdown that we've documented previously (here and here), REIT's that have exposure to the Big Apple are starting to feel the impact to their bottom line.

While the US Treasury's semi-annual report on the foreign-exchange policies of major U.S. trading partners has traditionally been, pardon the pun, a paper tiger, as the US has not named a single country as a currency manipulator since it did so to China in 1994, and it didn't go so far as to blame any country as an outright manipulator in the just released April edition, there was a new addition to the latest report.

In an interesting interview with Finanz und Wirtschaft, Bianco Research president Jim Bianco discusses a variety of topics such as negative interest rates turning the entire credit process upside down, bank balance sheets being even more complex and concentrated than before the financial crisis, energy loans being an accident waiting to happen, the markets having veto power over the Fed, and gold having more room to run.

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What until now was mostly effete jawboning over US complaints surrounding China's territorial expansion ambitions in the South China Sea, including the occasional sailing of a US ship deep inside the disputed territorial waters (with zero impact especially now that China may soon start building maritime nuclear power plants in the area), changed dramatically earlier today when China officially denied a U.S. carrier strike group's request for a port visit to Hong Kong next week.

The Stennis strike group