United States

Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com

On the afternoon of Monday, August 21, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, and Kentucky Congressman Brett Guthrie took a visit to the vault of the US Mint’s gold depository in Fort Knox, Kentucky, a vault which, according to the US Treasury, holds gold bars containing 147,341,858 fine troy ounces of gold (4583 tonnes of gold).

Submitted by Paul Brodsky from Macro Allocation

Being Here

     “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.”

      - Chauncey Gardner (Chance, the Gardner)

This piece takes a roundhouse swing at politics, real and imagined, and discusses critical economic issues that politicians should actually apply a little intelligence to, but are not. Capitalism will ultimately set things right, but it will have to overcome the political dimension’s best efforts to ignore real issues.

Following this morning's plunge in new home sales...

After household formation collapsed in June...

It appears Institutional Risk Analyst's Chris Whalen is spot on with his mortgage finance update: "Winter Is Here"...

Kim Jong Un is once again showing the US exactly how disinterested he is in negotiating any settlement - particularly one that ultimately forces North Korea to surrender its nuclear weapons: To wit, Kim ordered more rockets and warheads during a televised visit to a local munitions factory just hours after Secretary of Defense James Mattis praised Kim’s “restraint” for not having launched any new missile strikes since the latest round of UN sanctions took effect on Aug. 5. Mattis also reiterated that the Trump administration would be open to talks.

How We Know The So-Called “Civil War” Was Not Over Slavery

Paul Craig Roberts

When I read Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s article ( http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/08/21/lincoln-myth-ideological-cornerstone-america-empire/ ) the question that lept to mind was, “How come the South is said to have fought for slavery when the North wasn’t fighting against slavery?”