The brief rebound in US manufacturing after the hurricanes appears to have ended as Markit's PMI dropped from 54.6 to 53.9 as new orders slowed amid soaring inflation. For once ISM Manufacturing also agreed with PMI - dropping to its lowest since July - with employment and export orders sinking.
While new orders slowed, the most notable item in the PMI data was that inflation is surging...
In response to the recent crackdown against RT and Sputnik who saw their TV station credentials recently yanked by the US government, which is rapidly descending into a neo-McCarthyite abyss, Russia’s parliament said it could bar U.S. media from reporting within its walls in retaliation.
Olga Savastyanova of the State Duma told Russian news agencies on Friday that she expects the Duma to adopt the ban next week.
Markets were thrown for a loop in the past 24 hours, with the Dow first soaring nearly 400 points on Thursday on expectations that tax reform was a done deal, when drama emerged just after the close when the Senate tax bill came this close to falling apart when the proposed "Trigger" was ruled as invalid, pushing a Thursday tax vote to this morning, and as of this moment the bill appears in limbo with the GOP scrambling to find ways to appease the sudden loud opposition among budget hawks. UBS economist Paul Donovan summarized it best this morning:
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Robert Mueller, a former director of the FBI who is working as a special prosecutor “investigating” a contrived hoax designed by the military/security complex and the DNC to destroy the Trump presidency, has yet to produce a scrap of evidence that Russiagate is anything but orchestrated fake news.
As William Binney and other top experts have said, if there is evidence of Russiagate, the NSA would have it. No investigation would be necessary. So where is the evidence?
Authored by Michael Hudson via Counterpunch.org,
In theory, the global financial system is supposed to help every country gain. Mainstream teaching of international finance, trade and “foreign aid” (defined simply as any government credit) depicts an almost utopian system uplifting all countries, not stripping their assets and imposing austerity.