United States

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

On October 3, 1913, US President Woodrow Wilson signed the Underwood-Simmons Act into law, creating what would become the first modern US income tax.

The legislation (at least, the income tax portion) was only 16 pages and imposed a base tax rate of just 1%.

The highest tax rate was set at 7%– and it only applied to individuals earning more than $500,000 per year, which is about $12.6 million today according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Warner Bros Pictures might want to rethink the shooting of San Andreas II – the sequel to the 2015 blockbuster about a massive earthquake striking the San Francisco Bay Area that starred the Rock, Paul Giamatti and a host of other A-list actors.

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

For decades in the United States, turkey has been the center of the Thanksgiving meal. Some eccentrics may offer other choices, such as roast beef or duck, but nowadays, it's a sure bet that few households will be offering horse meat as one of Thursday's featured dishes. 

Horse meat has largely disappeared from the Western diet, and not even our pets eat much horse anymore.

The minutes for the FOMC’s Oct/Nov meeting will be released at 2pm today, and are expected to be uneventful, just like the Fed meeting during which the central bank held rates between 1.00% and 1.25% in a unanimous vote, as expected, and where the only notable tweak was the small upgrade in the language used to describe the US economy, which is now seen to be expanding at a “solid rate” (versus “rising moderately” before), despite the disruptions caused by the recent hurricanes.

Global shares hit another record high on Wednesday, propelled higher by what increasingly more call (ir)rational exuberance, and investors’ unflagging enthusiasm for tech stocks. That said, S&P futures are unchanged the morning before Thanksgiving (at least before the market open ramp), as are European stocks (Stoxx 600 is flat), despite the euphoria in the Asian session which saw the MSCI Asia Pac index hit a new all time high...