United States

Authore by Leonid Brershidky via Bloomberg.com,

During Russian President Vladimir Putin's annual press conference on Thursday, a friendly journalist asked Putin whether the escalating tension in relations with the U.S. and the crumbling of arms control treaties would draw Russia into an unsustainable arms race. "We will ensure our security without engaging in an arms race," the president replied, citing widely diverging dollar numbers for the U.S. and Russian defense budgets. 

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Dear Donors, thank you for your support in 2017. Although you have kept me working yet another year, I find it encouraging that there are some Americans who can think independently and who want to know. As Margaret Mead said, it only takes a few determined people to change the world. Perhaps some of you will be those people.

 

Yesterday we published the first set of 7 "What If" scenarios that didn't make it into the Citi Credit team's (already rather gloomy) year-ahead forecast. Because while Citi's "base case" was clearly bearish (our summary can be found here), what was left unsaid was even more unsettling, if not troubling. As the bank's credit team wrote "what about the outcomes that didn’t quite make it into our base case?

Authored by James Traub via Foreign Policy,

The United States of America Is Decadent and Depraved

The problem isn’t Donald Trump – it’s the Donald Trump in all of us...

The United States announced a $285 million cut in the United Nations' "bloated" budget for next year, negotiated by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. A statement by the United States Mission to the United Nations reads: