United States

S&P futures are slightly lower (ES -0.1%) as traders paid little attention to the latest missile test by North Korea on Friday, with shares and other risk assets barely moving, gold lower and focus rapidly returning to when and where interest rates will go up. Most global market are mostly unfazed, and the Korean Kospi actually closed up 0.4%, by the latest geopolitical escalation after a North Korean ballistic missile flew far enough to put the U.S. territory of Guam in range. European stocks edged fractionally lower while Asian shares advanced.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via OrinetalReview.org,

The US government is blatantly violating the most basic tenets of its purportedly “sacred” ideology of “human rights” and “free speech” by egregiously overstepping the bounds of FARA to engage in the same type of state-sponsored intimidation that it regularly accuses its geopolitical opponents of for far less.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Should you get free money from the U.S. government every month simply for being alive? 

That may sound like a crazy idea to many of us, but the truth is that this will likely be one of the biggest political issues in the 2020 presidential election.

Update 1:  According to Fox News, the U.S. has now confirmed the latest North Korean missile launch.

U.S. OFFICIAL CONFIRMS #NORTHKOREA FIRED BALLISTIC MISSILE: FOX NEWS

*WHITE HOUSE SAYS TRUMP BRIEFED ON N.KOREA MISSILE: YONHAP NEWS

* * *

All the diplomatic posturing, the jawboning, the UN sanctions, and threats over the past three weeks has achieved absolutely nothing because as Yonhap and NHK report, North Korea has just launched an "unidentified" missile eastward from the capital Pyongyang.

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.