United States

Submitted by Colin Chilcoat via OilPrice.com,

The United States and Canada work well together. The countries share the world’s largest and most comprehensive trade relationship, exchanging more than $2 billion per day in goods and services; the U.S. is Canada’s largest foreign investor and Canada is the third-largest foreign investor in the U.S. The partnership clearly isn’t broken, but it may need some mending as bilateral and international gas trade stands to complicate matters in short order.

There has been an odd shift when it comes to US sentiment toward home ownership: while in the past, the higher home prices rose the greater the demand was for housing (leading ultimately to the housing debt bubble of 2006), this time around we are getting increasingly more frequent indications of just the opposite.

Some have started to notice: as we noted one week ago, in its traditionally cheerful assessment of the US housing market, the NAR's Larry Yun snuck in an unexpected warning:

Submitted by Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org,

“I think Smedley Butler was onto something,” Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former George W. Bush administration heavyweight, told Salon in an exclusive interview.

Major General Smedley Butler earned the highest rank in the U.S. Marine Corps, accumulating numerous accolades as he helped lead the United States through decades of war. He later became an ardent critic of such militarism and imperialism.

Herding cats is a notoriously difficult task, but Janet Yellen served notice on Tuesday that no matter what emanates from other members of the US monetary politburo, there’s only one house view and that’s her’s. “As she spoke, I couldn’t help picturing a mother lion swatting her misbehaving cubs back into line,” Bloomberg’s Richard Breslow wrote this morning.

While there’s something disturbing about picturing the “diminutive” Fed chair as a “mother lion,” the analogy seems apt.

At the end of the day, it was all about the dollar.