Via MauldinEconomics.com,
You often hear me harping on the dangers of too much debt, and I keep my eyes peeled for significant work that backs up my concerns.
In my recent Outside the Box, good friend Dr. Lacy Hunt of Hoisington Investment Management gave us more ammunition to take on those who just don’t seem to get that the endless piling up of debt is not a sustainable way to run an economy.
Headlines that have recently hit the media say that the Saudis are threatening to sell off assets worth hundreds of billions of US dollars if the congress passes the 9/11 report. But according to a report by Moon of Alabama, it is not the Saudis who are making threats, it’s actually congress who are threatening to seize Saudi U.S. assets: It is the U.S. Congress that is threatening to lift the immunity of nation states in front of U.S.
Richard Gamble reviews John Wilsey’s American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion, and finds Wilsey’s version of exceptionalism to be dangerous in its own way:
Currently the US Dollar, traded on the stock market as (UUP), and (USDU); is the world's reserve currency. Although there is talk of the fall of the US Dollar as the world reserve currency, it's all talk and there's no signs that this will happen any time soon. Hungary recently issued sovereign bonds in Yuan - but so what? It's just a drop in the bucket. The practical fact is there is no real threat to the US Dollar's status as a reserve currency. However, there may be one.
Back in 2014 Obama promised that as part of the US war against ISIS, there would be "no ground troops in Iraq." Moments ago U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter gave the latest confirmation that Obama was not being exactly "honest", when during a visit to Baghdad in which he met U.S. commanders, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, and Iraqi Defence Minister Khaled al-Obeidi, he announced that the US would send another 200 additional troops, raising the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to about 4,100.