Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
The flyover zones of America are wanting for work and buried in debt. That’s the legacy of three decades of Washington/Wall Street Bubble Finance. The latter has exported jobs, crushed the purchasing power of main street wages and showered the bicoastal elites with the windfalls of financialization.
Via The Economic Cycle Research Institute,
There are just two drivers setting the pace for today's risk mood: the OPEC meeting in Vienna which started a few hours ago, and the ECB's announcement as well as Mario Draghi's press statement due out just one hour from now. Both are expected to not reveal any major surprises, with OPEC almost certainly unable to implement a production freeze while the ECB is expected to remain on hold and provide some more details on its corporate bond buying program, although there is some modest risk of upside surprise in either case.
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
In the aftermath of the bizarre SWIFT hack that supposedly allowed brazen Asian hackers to steal $81 million from the account of the Bangladesh central bank held at the Fed, attention has predictably shifted to the question of whether there was just "one cockroach." As it turns out there were at least 50. As Reuters reports, citing Fed records, "the U.S. Federal Reserve detected more than 50 cyber breaches between 2011 and 2015, with several incidents described internally as "espionage."