United States

The dollar jumped the most in two weeks, pushing Treasury yields as much as 6bps higher (before easing back) with US equity indexes primed for a another record-setting day after Senate Republicans approved a reduction in the corporate tax rate as part of a sweeping overhaul, giving a boost to President Donald Trump’s stimulus plans. The key market catalyst was the US Senate passing the tax reform bill through a vote of 51 vs 49 just before 2am on Saturday morning.

Authored by Eric Zuesse,

The Stanford mathematician William J. Perry was a strategic nuclear advisor to U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and then he became U.S. Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton.

Days after North Korea launched its most advanced ICBM which reportedly can hit a target anywhere in the United States with its 8,000+ mile range, Pyongyang said the U.S. is "begging" for a nuclear war by planning the "largest-ever" joint aerial drill with South Korea, according to Bloomberg. “Should the Korean peninsula and the world be embroiled in the crucible of nuclear war because of the reckless nuclear war mania of the U.S., the U.S. will have to accept full responsibility for it,” North Korea’s state-run KCNA said Saturday, citing a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Neocon Senator Lindsay Graham was stoking the flame of what is looking like increasingly probable war with North Korea today, when he warned on national TV that rising tensions between the the US and Pyongyang means preparations for war need to be taken, and that dependents of U.S. military personnel in South Korea should be relocated after the latest North Korean missile test.

Authored by Tom Luongo,

The first rule of politics is feather your own nest.  President Trump’s tax cut proposal always had this in mind.

Congress has passed a bill which tinkers at the edges but leaves most of Trump’s core proposal intact.  It’s obvious to me that Trump has the political acumen of another brilliant U.S. politician, the loathsome Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yeah, I’m not a fan of FDR.  But I do respect his political skill in the same way I respect the way sharks hunt their prey.