United States

In a move that Bloomberg has defined as "signalling a turn away from the NATO military alliance that has anchored Turkey to the West for more than six decades" Turkey agreed to pay $2.5 billion to acquire Russia’s most advanced missile defense system, a senior Turkish official told Bloomberg on Thursday. The proposed deal which was first reported here back in November 2016, has been finalized and the preliminary agreement sees Turkey receiving two S-400 missile batteries from Russia within the next year, then producing another two inside Turkey.

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Behind the sensational Western media coverage now linking the US president’s son to alleged Russian collusion in the American election, the real euphoria stems from relief that, at last, some «evidence» has been found.

For more than seven months now, the US corporate media have been running unrelenting claims that somehow Donald J Trump colluded with Russian state-sponsored hackers to get elected over his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton.

New data released by the Chinese government suggests trade with its restive neighbor, North Korea, has only increased by a modest degree since the beginning of the year, rebutting criticisms from President Donald Trump and UN ambassador Nikki Haley that the world's second-largest economy is undermining US efforts to curb trade with the North.

Authored by Craig Wilson via The Daily Reckoning,

Nomi Prins joined The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo to discuss the banking landscape and state of financial regulations in the Trump era. The central bank historian and financial expert also took a deep dive into the shifting relations between the United States and Japan and what easy money policy has meant for financial markets.

KKR has just published their 2017 mid-year economic outlook and it includes some rather dire predictions for the U.S. economy.  Among other things, KKR predicts a U.S. recession by 2019 and a massive cycle of millennial deleveraging after a huge expansion of consumer credit in the form of student and auto loans.

Before getting into the details, here's a chart depicting how KKR sums up the macro picture.  In short, pretty much every major economic growth and asset valuation metric in the U.S. is flashing red warning signs relative to historical norms.