United States

Russia have announced that they have added former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to its terror watchlist, after the Federal Security Service (FSB) discovered that one of the Clinton campaign’s top monetary contributors is a suspected ISI agent who funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorist groups in the Middle East.  Hillary Clinton’s addition to the terrorist sponsor watchlist makes her the highest ranking US official to be put on the list.

Submitted by Sandro Rosa and Mark Dittli via Finanz und Wirtschaft,

According to macro strategist Felix Zulauf, founder and president of Zulauf Asset Management and Vicenda Asset Management in Zug, the almost seven-year-old bull market is over. China is to the current cycle what the US housing market was for the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. It will take years to correct the excesses that were built up in China.

Mr. Zulauf, the markets had a terrible start into the new year. Is the almost seven-year old equity bull market over?

One week ago, in the aftermath of the dramatic downgrade to junk of Asian commodity giant Noble Group, we showed readers the list of potential "fallen angel" companies, those "investment "grade companies (such as Freeport McMoRan whose CDS trades at near-default levels) who are about to be badly junked, focusing on the 18 or so US energy companies that are about to lose their investment grade rating.

In November of 2014, we announced the quiet death of the petrodollar.

The system which underwrote decades of dollar dominance and kept a perpetual bid under USD assets met an untimely demise when the Saudis moved to bankrupt the US shale complex by deliberately suppressing oil prices.

The implications, we said, would be far-reaching.

Last May, after the "harsh snowfall" of Q1 crushed US GDP (when it was really the bursting of China's shadow banking bubble) leading to sellside analysts first, and then the Bureau of Economic Analysis to decide the time has come to double seasonally GDP data to avoid such embarrassments as a negative print in the middle of a recovery, Bank of America's chief economist Ethan Harris rushed to declare victory.

Explicitly targeting the "perma-bears" this is what Harris said: