United States

In their 2Q 2017 survey, UBS found that, for the first time since at least 2014, the trajectory of financial health of low-income households has started to diverge from that of more affluent households.  Per the graph below from UBS' credit strategy team led by Matthew Mish, while a firming job market has helped households making over $100,000 feel more confident about covering their monthly expenses, spiraling debt balances has left low-income families even more vulnerable to the slightest monthly surprises with 70% reporting that their income just barely covers mo

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Authored by Darius Shahtahmasebi via TheAntiMedia.org,

Iranian officials have struck back at the Trump administration’s verbal attacks on Iran, suggesting the U.S. should worry about its own domestic problems before turning a critical eye towards them. According to al-Monitor, an arguably pro-Tehran media site:

Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com

The COMEX gold futures market and the London OTC gold market have a joint monopoly on setting the international gold price. This is because these two markets generate the largest ‘gold’ trading volumes and have the highest ‘liquidity’. However, this price setting dominance is despite either of these two markets actually trading physical gold bars. Both markets merely trade different forms of derivatives of gold bars.

On Monday morning, we excerpted from the latest report by BofA's David Woo, who echoed a familiar lament when looking at the divergence between global political risk and the collapse in cross-asset volatility, concluding that he finds it "difficult to reconcile the record low volatility in financial markets at the moment with growing political risk in Washington and geopolitical risk in Asia.