United States

From Nuisance to Threat: The High Cost of Truth

Paul Craig Roberts

When one gives so much scarce time and energy from one’s life to a large and unknown public, one needs to know that it is sufficiently appreciated to be a worthwhile use of one’s time and energy. This is especially the case when there are large costs associated with the commitment.

Your response to my quarterly request for donations showed me that enough of you value what I am doing to justify its continuation.

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

The U.S. shale cowboys are back on their horses and leading a strong recovery in the oil patch that is not expected to falter even as WTI prices dropped last week below $50 per barrel for the first time in more than two months.

World stock indexes soared to record highs on Thursday while the dollar traded close to a one-month low after the Federal Reserve hiked U.S. interest rates but signaled no pick-up in the pace of tightening. European and Asian were broadly higher this morning, with S&P tagging along, driven by two main events: the latest "dovish" Fed rate hike, and the Dutch election results, in which Geert Wilders performed worse than some expected, reducing concerns of Eurozone political risk, and broadly seen as a sign of support for Europe's establishment.

Authored by Andrei Akulov via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

With Donald Trump leading the United States, Europe seems to be losing trust in the American nuclear umbrella. As the EU focuses on the need to have its own military, the issue of European nuclear deterrent comes to the fore. The debate has been triggered. This issue is intensively discussed in Germany.

The U.S. economy is so big that all of the individual states are comparable to entire countries...

As Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, not surprisingly – big states like California, New York, and Texas are very similar in size to other formidable economies like France, South Korea, and Canada.

Perhaps even more interesting, however, is that even small states are similar to the size of countries.