United States

While few predicted the stock market surge should Trump get elected, virtually everyone anticipated a thawing of relations between Russia and the US if Donald Trump were to occupy the White House. And yet, 5 months later, the opposite has happened: stocks are just shy of the record 2,400 while relations between the Kremlin and the White House, despite all the rhetoric of Trump being an extended KGB agent or whatever the NYT/WaPo unsubstantiated narrative of the day is, have remained abysmal with no hope of improvement in sight.

In a reminder that Donald Trump's trade policies - at least as he represented in the past, before surrounding himself with ex-Goldman globalists - are largely protectionist, on Friday, the US President will sign executive orders aimed at "identifying abuses" that are causing "massive U.S. trade deficits" and clamp down on non-payment of anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties on imports, his top trade officials said quoted by Reuters.

Stocks fell worldwide on the last day of the quarter, with US equity futures pointing to a lower open even as the S&P is set for its best quarter since 2015 amid persistent economic and political uncertainty.

Submitted by Nick Colas of Convergex

Is Public Equity A Broken Concept

Authored by James Holbrooks via TheAntiMedia.org,

Adding fuel to an already highly combustible situation in Southeast Asia, Reuters reported Tuesday that China has “largely completed major construction of military infrastructure on artificial islands it has built in the South China Sea,” and that the Asian superpower “can now deploy combat planes and other military hardware there at any time.”