United States

Via The Daily Bell

Banks are supposed to be the epitome of secure. You can put your money in their vaults, and forget about it. Don’t worry everything will be fine. And even if the bank goes under, the federal government insures deposits of up to $250,000.

But that won’t help if the government is the thief. The United States government can freeze your bank accounts for basically no reason, without due process. Then it is up to you to prove your innocence.

Via Disobedient Media

As China's economy has boomed, corporations and individuals with historically close ties to the government have been the major beneficiaries. Sitting flush with massive amounts of cash on hand, power players in the Chinese markets have increasingly sought to branch out and increase their investments in foreign countries. Many of these investments target key industries despite their own government often restricting or forbidding the same kind of foreign investment domestically.

In a world where stat arbs do most of the trading, and where central banks set the prices, everything is a correlation of a correlation of a correlation, and as we have not tired of pointing out since 2010, virtually every correlation starts with the USDJPY, the preferred funding vehicles for BOJ intervention in capital markets, as well as an indicator of Japanese pension fund, in most cases the GPIF, activity in the US risk assets.

In its latest weekly Economic Indicators Update, Goldman charts the ongoing paradoxical divergence between the Fed's professed tightening path and what is actually taking place in the US stock market, where it finds that financial conditions are the easiest they have been in two years.

One month ago, Goldman discussed this topic in depth when Jan Hatzius implicitly asked if Yellen has lost control of the market, and warned that in order to normalize fin conditions, the Fed may be forced to follow through with a "policy shock."

With traders realizing that the "Thursday Turmoil Trifecta" looms, world stocks dropped and safe-haven assets rose as investors focused on the growing tension in the Middle East, while caution spread across markets in a week full of risk events including James Comey’s congressional testimony to the ECB’s policy meeting and Britain’s increasingly uncertain election, all in the span of 24 hours. As a result, European and Asian stocks as well as S&P futures all fell, while gold, yen and Treasuries gained.