United States

The writing was on the wall long before the largest US insurer, UnitedHealth, decided to pull the plug on Obamacare in mid April.  Then, just a week later, Aetna’s CEO said Thursday that his company expects to break even, but legislative fixes are needed to make the marketplace sustainable.

"I think a lot of insurance carriers expected red ink, but they didn’t expect this much red ink,” said Greg Scott, who oversees Deloitte’s health plans practice. "... A number of carriers need double-digit increases."

It gets better.

by David Haggith

The US became an unsustainable service sector based economy from the 1970s onward when service sector employment diverged from manufacturing without a corresponding boost in productivity. Even Alan Greenspan has warned that America is "in trouble basically because productivity is dead in the water..." There are numerous reasons for this plunge in worker-productivity, from perverted inventives not to work to unintended consequences of monetary policy enabling zombies, but perhaps the most critical driver is exposed in the following dismal chart...

Now that there have been at least four documented close encounters between Russian fight jets and US ships and/or spy planes (including two barrel rolls) in the past two weeks, each of which has taken place in the immediate vicinity of Russia's borders (or above Russian naval bases), there have been two recurring questions: i) why does the US continue provoking Russia with its "fly-by" attempts, well aware what the Russian response would be and ii) if one simply ignores who was the instigator, why has Obama not contacted Putin to at least express indignation at these interceptions.

The biggest financial and geopolitical story from mid-April was Saudi Arabia's threat that should the US pass a bipartisan law which would take away immunity from foreign governments in cases arising from a "terrorist attack that kills an American on American soil" and specifically could hold the Saudi kingdom responsible for its role in the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, then the Saudis would retaliate by selling up to $750 billion in American assets.