United States

When it comes to dealing with the mass media and its impact on public confidence, China has a long and illustrious history of not beating around the bush.  Last summer around the time its stock market bubble started to crack, Beijing banned the use of such terms as "equity disaster" and "rescue the market." Then earlier this year, China's president Xi Jingping visited the country’s three big state news organizations, Xinhua, the People’s Daily and China Central Television, to lecture them on the need to toe the party line, "tell China’s sto

Authored by AP's Lolita Baldor, via Military.com,

No one disputes that U.S. military forces are fighting in combat in Iraq and Syria -- except maybe President Barack Obama and some members of his administration.

Following this weekend's leak by Greenpeace demonstrating not only that the TTIP is driven entirely by narrow corporate interests, but that Obama is openly willing to reneg on his pro-environment agenda just to pass the Transatlantic Treaty at any cost, the blowback arrived earlier today when France became the first major European nation which threatened to reject the huge free trade deal between the U.S. and the European Union, because according to AP "it's too friendly to U.S. business and probably doomed."

There has been a surprising mood change at JPM over the past 4 months: after initially changing the company's long-held view on equities, which for the first time since 2007 it is no longer holds at overweight, JPM's head equity strategist Mislav Matejka has been quite vocal on urging clients to take advantage of the current rally and sell into it. To be sure, this was surprising because whether JPM is talking its book or not, the bank stands to generate more client fees if the prevailing sentiment is one of bullish optimism rather than the opposite.

Submitted by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

The average price of gas in the United States is now at $2.22, up 8 cents over last week, hitting a 6-month high. This, in stark contrast to February’s ultra-low gas prices of $1.68 per gallon - a level that had not been since the end of 2008.

Then, the price drop lasted only five months from December 2008 to May 2009 when it rose to $2.24 per gallon.