United States

Since November 8th, the mainstream media and the social media giants of Silicon Valley have launched an all-out crusade against so-called "fake news" sources (of which we're apparently one).  Twitter has gone so far as to purge dozens of "alt-right" accounts and just yesterday Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman, announced that he too would ban the "most toxic" Trump supporters who had the audacity to call him names after he abused his administrative privileges to alter other people text threads.

When we last looked at the performance of deep discount retailer Dollar General three months ago, we found something troubling: company CEO Todd Vasos, who badly missed its earnings expectations, admitted on the Q2 conference call that he was surprised to admit that while on the surface things are supposed to be getting better, the reality is vastly different for low-income US consumers:

In his annual address to the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin struck an unusually conciliatory tone on Thursday, saying Moscow wanted to get on with the incoming U.S. administration and was looking to make friends not enemies: "We are ready to cooperate with the new U.S. administration. We have a shared responsibility to ensure international security."

"We don't want confrontation with anyone. We don't need it. We are not seeking and have never sought enemies. We need friends," Putin told Russia's political elite gathered in the Kremlin's grand hall.

Corporate tax reform has been a key policy initiative of Trump's as he has called for slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% down to 15%.  While this is welcome news for most companies, it would result in some fairly staggering writedowns for Wall Street's largest banks that amassed substantial net operating losses in 2008 and 2009.

According to Bloomberg, Citibank would be hardest hit with writedowns that could hit earnings for up to $12 billion or more.