United States

As reported earlier after decades of keeping Saudi Arabian holdings of treasury paper non-public and bundled with those of other "oil exporting nations", today at 4pm for the first time the US Treasury confirmed that its "leaked" look at Saudi holdings, exposed as a result of a Bloomberg FOIA, was accurate when it reported that the Saudis owned $116.8 billion in US paper as of March 31, which made the country the 13th largest holder of US Treasurys.

Submitted by Jacob Hess via OilPrice.com,

The Chinese slowdown did more than drag down its own economy, it singlehandedly created financial tremors throughout the global financial markets. With consistent growth rates well over 6 percent, China's economic health is an integral part of global expansion.

In recent days we have witnessed a massive outflow from virtually all holders of stocks. Just last week we reported that retail had just dumped the most stocks in the past 5 weeks since the August 2011 US downgrade...

... confirming a long-running trend observed with BofA smart money clients who, as we also reported last week, have sold stocks for 15 of the past 15 weeks, the longest selling stretch on record.

This has repeatedly prompted many to wonder who is buying.

At Aleteia, John Burger wrote a really good piece about the Benedict Option and why it appeals to many Christians these days. He has examples: a Catholic one, an Evangelical one, and an individual one. The piece begins like this:

For the most part, Christians have had a happy — some would even say “privileged” — time of it in America, where Christianity and Christian churches were essentially left alone as they freely exercised their religion within society both privately and, up until recently, in partnership with the government.

Over the weekend, we were surprised to read that none other than recent market cheerleader Goldman Sachs had come up with six reasons why its chief equity strategist believes the market is poised for a material draw down (read "big drop") in the coming weeks. Among these were the following: