United States

Russia's largest bank, Sberbank, has confirmed that it hired the consultancy of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of John Podesta who chaired Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, for lobbying its interests in the United States and proactively seeking the removal of various Obama-era sanctions, the press service of the Russian institution told TASS on Thursday.

"The New York office of Sberbank CIB indeed hired Podesta Group. Engagement of external consultants is part of standard business practices for us," Sberbank said.

Our Age Of Folly

Paul Craig Roberts

The United States has been growing progressively insane for a long time. For my generation, the realization descended upon us in the 1960s when the military/security complex convinced Americans that if we permitted Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh to unify Vietnam, the dominoes would fall until the Communist World Revolution had us in its grip. This despite the fact that Stalin had killed off the Trotskyist world revolutionaries and declared “Socialism in one country.”

Following the Trump presidential victory, two prominent macro strategists have undergone a significant change in their outlook: while David Rosenberg, who started off with a deflationary, and bearish outlook, then flipped to inflationary (and bullish), has recently once more "mean-reverted" and expects a further drop in yields as deflationary forces return, his SocGen peer, Albert Edwards - while still expecting a deflationary "ice age" in the longer-run (in case there is any confusion, he expressly states "make no mistake.

Thanks to a surge in prices from Canada and Asia Near East, US Import Prices soared more than expected in February. The 4.6% rise is the highest since February 2012, driven by a 40.5% surge year-over-year in Fuels and lubricants.

Notably US import prices from Mexico fell 0.3% YoY.

As had been periodically leaked over the past several weeks, overnight both Poliico and the WSJ confirm that President Trump has offered former Utah governor Jon Huntsman the job of U.S. ambassador to Russia and is in the process of submitting paperwork to accept the position; Huntsman is said to have accepted the offer. This is the latest sign of backtracking from plans for Washington-Moscow conciliation, a development which will make future reports based on "anonymous sources" that Trump is a Kremlin puppet even more problematic.