Earlier today, a veteran White House correspondent laid out his version of how Obama "gets away with it" in a news cycle when everyone's attention should be glued to the economic failures of the lame duck president. One thing he forgot to mention, however, was the use of such conventional "rally around the flag" tactics as taking out a key symbolic nemesis of the US to drum up patriotic fervor.
A little over a month ago, conventional wisdom (and overrated pundits) said that Trump has no chance of being the republican nominee. They were all wrong, but so was the market which continued to ignore the possibility of a Trump presidency until well after the fact. And, as always happens, now is when if not the market, then certainly Goldman's clients are finally trying to catch up. As Goldman strategist David Kostin (who just one week ago warned that there is now a substantial risk of a market drop ahead of the year end), writes "Politics is now a topic in every client discussion."
While the warning flags are raging in Illinois and Connecticut, JPMorgan's Michael Cembalest states that New Jersey's problems are "not mathematically solvable." The stunning admission from a status-quo-sustaining bank that is “very focused on the total indebtedness of US states," should be worrisome enough but as Cembalest explains the answer to a debt problem is not always piling up more debt; the issue is to address the root of the problem, which can be a delicate and at times politically incorrect topic.
By the SRSrocco Report,
This gold chart should have Central Banks extremely worried. Why? Because the change in physical gold and Central Bank demand since the first crash of the U.S. and global markets in 2008 is literally off the charts.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say that health officials are monitoring nearly 300 pregnant women infected with the Zika virus across the U.S. and its territories. RT reports: Health officials are keeping tabs on 157 pregnant women who have been infected within the 50 US states, the CDC said on Friday. That is more than three times higher than the CDC previously reported on May 11, when it said that 48 pregnant women in the US had the virus.