United States

While much of Trump's Sunday tweets have focused on the government response to the devastation resulting from the historic Texas and Houston flooding as Tropical Storm Harvey is expected to unleash as much as 40 inches of rain, the US president managed to sneak in a few threats to his North American neighbors, reiterating what he has periodically said, most recently last week, that the U.S. may cancel the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Authored by Lakshman Achuthan and Anirvan Banerj via Bloomberg.com,

Two things bear most of the blame: external shocks and economic volatility.

The U.S. managed to avoid recession after the financial crisis, but Japan has succumbed to three contractions since 2009. Economic volatility is a key reason for this divergence, and that tells us a great deal about the risk of future U.S. recessions.

While the financial industry remains divided over what precisely is the cause of the malaise that affects modern markets, characterized by plunging volumes and trading activity, record low volatility and dispersion, a relentless ascent disconnected from fundamentals, and generally a sense of foreboding doom, manifested by an all time high OMT skew - or record high price for crash insurance - as discussed previously...

From Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, the US has had a military presence across the world, from almost day one of its independence. For those who have ever wanted a clearer picture of the true reach of the United States military - both historically and currently - but shied away due to the sheer volume of research required to find an answer, The Anti Media points out that a crew at the Independent just made things a whole lot simpler.

In this week's MacroVoices podcast, Erik Townsend and Joe McMonigle, former chief of staff at the US Department of Energy, discuss the state of the global energy market, and OPEC’s rapidly diminishing ability to control oil prices. McMonigle believes investors will be hearing more jawboning from the Saudis, OPEC's de-facto leader, over the next two weeks as they try to marshal support for extending the cartel's production-cut agreement past a March 2018 deadline.