Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
The Dow Jones Industrial Average provides us with some pretty strong evidence that our “stock market boom” has been fueled by debt. On Wednesday, the Dow crossed the 20,000 mark for the first time ever, and this comes at a time when the U.S. national debt is right on the verge of hitting 20 trillion dollars.
While the S&P500 market may remain pinned just why of all time highs, this appears to be from ongoing short covering, and is not - at least in the latest week - the result of new money entering the market. Quite the opposite: according to the latest BofA fund flow analysis based on EPFR data, in the latest week, US equities saw $6.3 billion in outflows, the largest weekly redemption from US mutual funds and ETFs in four months, since before the presidential election.
Following today's extremely disappointing US GDP growth data, we have the final nail in the coffin of President Obama's economic reign. Not only is the average annual growth rate of just 1.48% during Obama's business cycle the weakest of any expansion since at least 1949, he has just become the only President to have not had even one year of 3% GDP growth.
An average annual GDP growth of 1.48% during Obama's two terms...
Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote poet Robert Frost in the opening line of “Mending Walls.”
And on the American left there is something like revulsion at the idea of the “beautiful wall” President Trump intends to build along the 1,900-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico.
The opposition’s arguments are usually rooted in economics or practicality. The wall is unnecessary. It will not stop people from coming illegally. It costs too much.
While so far Trump's trade focus was fallen mostly on Nafta countries, and to a lesser extent China, one country that is taking precautionary steps is the one which recently suffered a major loss when Trump signed an executive order to exit the TPP, effectively killing the trade deal: Japan. The TPP, which took years to negotiate among 12 countries, has often been described as being, at its core, a deal between the United States and Japan, the world's largest and third-largest economies respectively.