United States

Remember when auditors were, by their very definition, supposed to be the embodiment of credibility, trustworthiness and moral fiber? The Brazilian arm of Big Four auditing giant, Deloitte, forgot these  simple prerequisites and as a result the US auditing watchdog fined the firm a record $8 million for what amounts to massive fraud: falsifying audit reports, altering documents and providing false testimony during an investigation that unearthed what it described as its “most serious” finding of misconduct.

Submitted by Alex Christoforou of The Duran

This is becoming a familiar pattern. Every time Lavrov and Kerry appear to be making some sort of progress on ending hostilities in Syria, an unwarranted, and oddly timed attack on forces sided with the Syrian government occur.

On September 9th, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary John Kerry agreed to a cessation of hostilities in Syria, amid an ultimatum for the US to finally separate the “moderate rebels” from the Al Qaeda-Al Nusra jihadi fighters.

Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

As BofA's rates strategist Ralf Preusser writes in a note this morning, "not even a month since the US election and markets seem unrecognizable" adding that the Trump election represented a paradigm shift. Fiscal easing would take over from monetary easing and would allow for the dollar and rates to rise in unison, a trend not seen for a while.

Less than two months ago, after the Algiers meeting but before the Vienna OPEC summit when speculation was rife that the cartel would be unable to reach a deal to cut production, we reported that "US Oil Producers Are Hedging At Levels Not Seen Since 2007" in which we wrote that "while OPEC has been busy desperately jawboning oil higher, US producers have been worried about oil's reacquaintance with gravity. As a result, as the EIA reports, the amount of WTI short positions held be producers and merchants is just shy of a decade high."