United States

Authored by Zainab Calcuttawala via OilPrice.com,

Riyadh plans to purposely reduce exports to the United States to force a reduction in the latter’s sizeable inventories, which are preventing a greater rise in global oil prices, according to Saudi Oil Minister Khalid Al-Falih.

Just one day after OPEC announced a nine-month extension to its November production cut deal, the top oil official told reporters on Friday that “exports to the U.S. will drop measurably.”

In the end it was not mean to be. As discussed on Friday, during Trump's first G-7 summit, world leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President Emmanuel Macron, had hoped to persuade the the US president to endorse the Paris Agreement climate pledge to fight global warming.

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

The best strategy for dealing with crazies is to keep your distance.

You try to ignore the ravings of the paranoid lunatic on a street corner, but if he’s waving a gun, you can’t.  He may kill himself, but he may kill you. Protecting yourself is your first consideration. You want to get as far as possible from him.

Less than a month after the US Air Force successfully test fired two Minuteman ICBM missiles from California's Vanderberg Air Force base, which hit a target approximately 4,200 miles away at Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, today Pentagon officials said that the US will try to shoot down an intercontinental-range missile for the first time in a test next week, in "preparation for North Korea's growing threat." According to AP, the stated goal is "to more closely simulate a North Korean ICBM aimed at the U.S. homeland."

As SocGen's Kit Juckes noted earlier in the week, "The ECB, not The Fed, is in the driving seat," and nowhere is that more optically obvious than in the massive divergence between US-EU bond risk premia and US-EU inflation surprises.