That China is a widely accepted global outlier in the context of credit, debt and leverage, look no further than the latest Financial Stability Report from the IMF, which in no uncertain terms lays out where China can be "found" relative to its G-20 peers in the following chart:
Yet according to the IMF, China's bleak picture is based on a relatively rosy estimate of the country's non-financial debt to GDP at approximately "only" 242%.
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
US stock markets hit another all-time high on Friday.
The S&P 500 is nearing 2,600 and the Dow is over 23,300.
In fact, US stocks have only been more expensive two times since 1881.
The Harmful Effects of Antifa
Diana Johnstone
An historic opportunity is being missed. The disastrous 2016 presidential election could and should have been a wakeup call. A corrupt political system that gave voters a choice between two terrible candidates is not democracy.
One day after Rex Tillerson's visit to Saudi Arabia, which came as part of the US Secretary of State's concerted efforts to curb Iran's rapidly expanding influence in the region, including boosting the clout of Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia in Shiite-majority Iraq, and urging Iranian militias to leave Iraq as the "fighting against ISIS comes to an end", Tillerson made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan's capital Kabul, where he is in discussions with President Ashraf Ghani about the United States’ policy towards South Asia.
Every quarter, the Fed's Flow of Funds report discloses - among many other things - the total U.S. household net worth, and every quarter for the past two years this number has steadily gone up, hitting fresh all time highs with every new release, most recently $96.2 trillion, to widespread cheers from both the financial press and the public, as well as the administration.