United States

Via Nicholas Eberstadt of CommentaryMagazine.com,

On the morning of November 9, 2016, America’s elite—its talking and deciding classes—woke up to a country they did not know. To most privileged and well-educated Americans, especially those living in its bicoastal bastions, the election of Donald Trump had been a thing almost impossible even to imagine. What sort of country would go and elect someone like Trump as president? Certainly not one they were familiar with, or understood anything about.

I

The US has Jeff Sessions, but China is about to have "two sessions".

Starting Sunday is a two-week period of heightened political discourse, if not exactly debate, among the top echelons of China's Politburo, also known as China's "two sessions."

The relentless, steady, monotonous levitation to all time highs keeps chugging along: while last week saw the S&P experience its first 1% intraday move in nearly two months, there has yet to be a comparable move on the downside. As Deutsche Bank notes, pull backs of 3-5% in the S&P 500 are typical every 2 to 3 months historically. The last such pull back occurred just prior to the US presidential election.

While the media continues to blast the occasional OPEC production-related headline, the reality is that crude supply is increasingly becoming a shale story, as the US, now tens of billions in debt lighter - has rapidly emerged as the low-cost, marginal oil producer.

Long before Kim Jong-Un launched his latest ballistic missile test in February, prompting an angry response from not only the US, Japan and various other countries, most notably China, which banned North Korean coal imports in retaliation and unleashed what may be a political crisis in Pyongyang, former president Barack Obama was already engaged in a cyberwar with North Korea.