United States

If a surge in covenant-lite levered loans is any indication that debt and equity markets are nearing the final stages of their bubbly ascent, then perhaps now is a good time for investors to take their profits and run.  As the Wall Street Journal points out this morning, levered loans volumes in the U.S. are once again surging, eclipsing even 2007 levels, despite the complete implosion of bricks-and-mortar retailers and continued warnings that "the market is getting frothy."

Authored by Paul Brodsky via Macro-Allocation.com,

Golden Age

Once upon a time the capital markets consisted of a fairly closed community, comprised on one side by mostly clever, well-connected men working together in syndicate to maintain control over national economic and financial affairs, and on the other side by mostly high earners spread disparately across the land hobnobbing with the syndicate’s local representatives.

Following the startling, impromptu allegation on Monday morning by North Korea's foreign minister Ri Yong Ho, who accused Trump of declaring war on North Korea, and warned Pyongyang would shoot down US jets, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Monday dismissed North Korea’s claims as "absurd."

“We have not declared war on North Korea and frankly the suggestion of that is absurd,” Sanders said during today's press briefing.

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

The descent of US/North Korea “crisis” to the level of schoolyard taunts should be remembered as one of the most bizarre, dangerous, and disgraceful chapters in US foreign policy history.

President Trump, who holds the lives of millions of Koreans and Americans in his hands, has taken to calling the North Korean dictator “rocket man on a suicide mission.”

Shortly after Russia disclosed on Sunday that a top Russian military commander, Lieutenant General Valery Asapov - who was serving as one of Russia’s "military advisers" in Syria - was fatally wounded by an exploding shell in a mortar attack by ISIS terrorists, on Monday the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that the “two-faced policy” of the United States was to blame for the death of the Russian General in Syria.