United States

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

Just over a week ago, we pointed out that China's great credit growth stimulus from early 2016, when the PBOC injected $1 trillion in new credit in the first quarter of the year, had come to a screeching halt in April, confirmed by the lack of growth in China's broadest credit aggregate, Total Social Financing, which had just dipped to a negative growth print year-over-year.

During the Oregon standoff, where a group of US citizens calling themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, seized control of a federal wildlife refuge in protest of harsh sentences being given to members of a ranching family for allegedly allowing fires set on their property to spread on to federal land, Ron Paul posed a question: Is the event isolated, or a sign of things to come?

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Oregon standoff was the latter.

A little over a year ago, GMO giant Monsanto was furious at the World Health Organization for linking glypshophate, the chief ingredient in weed killer Roundup, to cancer.  As a result Monsanto immediately demanded that WHO retract said report, saying that the report was biased and contradicts regulatory findings that the ingredient, glyphosate, is safe when used as labeled.

Following numerous violations of last summer's landmark comprehensive nuclear agreement, as Iran repeatedly test fired ballistic missile rockets in direct contravention of the treaty terms, a curious tangent emerged last week when a senior Iranian military commander claimed that U.S. officials had been "appeasing" the Iranian regime, and quietly encouraging the Islamic Republic to keep its illicit ballistic missile tests a secret so as not to raise concerns in the region, according to Persian language comments.