United States

Authored by Gabriel Rockhill via Counterpunch.org,

Authored by Tom Luongo,

Iran is joining the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). By early next year, February by this account, Iran will join the five founding members of the Union and open the door for Turkey to do so later in 2018.

Between this and the end of the war in Syria, it’s not hard to declare the Brzezinski Doctrine of U.S.-led Central Asian chaos as gasping its last breaths.

Lately, fund flow data has all the credibility of a NYT presidential poll two days before the Trump defeats Hillary.  On one hand, you have Lipper reporting that investors pulled $16.2bn from U.S.-based equity funds in the past week, the largest withdrawals since December 2016. The same Lipper also reported that taxable-bond mutual funds and ETFs recorded $1.2bn in outflows, with U.S.-based high-yield junk bond funds posting outflows of $922 million.

Very quietly, in the last few days, cross currency basis swaps (CCBS) related to the dollar have reversed their rise and started collapsing deeper into negative territory… again. This might not be of much interest to buyers of global equity markets at this point, but it is signalling ominous signs of growing funding stress in the financial “plumbing”.

Earlier this week, Seoul asked the US to delay joint military exercises with Japan until after the Winter Olympics, ostensibly to avoid provoking North Korea ahead of the 2018 Winter Games.