Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
The decision to launch nuclear weapons is political, not military.
As North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un declares that "The Entire US Territory Is Now Within Our ICBM Range", somewhere in the Pentagon, operational plans to neutralize North Korean nuclear and long-range missile capabilities are being refined.
The Witch Hunt for Donald Trump Surpasses the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93
Paul Craig Roberts
We should be scared to death that Sally Q. Yates served as a prosecutor in the Justice (sic) Department for 27 years. In the New York Times Sally takes high umbrage to Trump’s criticism of his attorney general, Sessions, and blows Trump’s disappointment with Sessions into an attack by Trump on the rule of law. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/opinion/sally-yates-protect-the-justice-department-from-president-trump.html
Just seemed appropriate...
July was a month of extremes across asset classes...
When we reported yesterday about Putin's surprisingly harsh response to last week's House legislation to launch new sanctions against Russia, which also binds Trump from unilaterally removing sanctions without getting Congressional approval, we concluded that "now we await the US re-retaliation in what is once again the same tit-for-tat escalation that marked the latter years of the Obama regime, as the US Military Industrial Complex breathes out a sigh of relief that for all the posturing by Trump, things between Russia and the US are back on autopilot."
There is no getting away from it: in what has become a long-running tradition, every day brings a new explanation (or at least attempt) to the current low-vol regime from a major bank, and today it was (again) Bank of America's turn to explain why the VIX, and cross asset vol in general, both continue to trade near all time low.