United States

Authored by Nouriel Roubini, originally posted at Project Syndicate,

When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, stock markets rallied impressively. Investors were initially giddy about Trump’s promises of fiscal stimulus, deregulation of energy, health care, and financial services, and steep cuts in corporate, personal, estate, and capital-gains taxes. But will the reality of Trumponomics sustain a continued rise in equity prices?

The latest strategist to step into the pro/anti-Trump fray, is one of the original permabears, SocGen's Albert Edwards, who in a Thursday note sided with Dan Loeb, and wrote that while the Donald Administration "might be a neo-liberal nightmare" if one strips away some of his more controversial rhetoric on immigration, "a lot of what he says on the economic front makes perfect sense to me."

Submitted by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

The recent National Intelligence Council report assessing the involvement of Russia in last year’s U.S. presidential elections spurred a flurry of media reports suggesting that Russia is heavily involved in anti-fracking campaigning. Some authors interpreted this involvement as a “propaganda effort”, while others claimed the Kremlin was financially backing anti-fracking groups in the U.S., without, however, providing any evidence for this claim.

With the US officially warning Iran twice over the past 24 hours in the harshest possible terms yet, when first national security advisor Michael Flynn, and then this morning Trump himself, said Iran has been "put on notice" for "destabilizing activity" after it fired a ballistic missile in defiance of UN resolutions, on Thursday a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted by Reuters as saying the country would not yield to "useless" U.S. threats from "an inexperienced person" over its ballistic missile program.

President Trump's first counter-terrorism operation, that ended in the death of U.S. Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens, was, Reuters reports according to military officials, undertaken without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.