Mind The RUT—-The Dangerous Season Starts Now
As can be seen, the Russell 2000 does indeed typically decline between May and October. However, there is one last surge into a mid July interim peak before it actually begins to fall rather noticeably. This underscores that it is important to analyze seasonal trends with precision. The period of seasonal weakness in the Russell 2000 Index is highlighted in dark blue on the chart. It begins on July 15 and ends on October 27.
Mind The Red Swan: Bank of America Pulls Ripcord on Chinese Conglomerate HNA.
Bank of America suddenly pulled back from doing business with HNA Group, a privately held Chinese conglomerate that has been on the forefront of highly leveraged, opaque Chinese conglomerates out on a mind-boggling debt-funded acquisition binge around the world.
Why Wage Growth Will Remain Elusive
The thing most overlooked by the majority of economists, politicians, and commentators, is the stark difference in the underlying economic and monetary fundamentals which provided the massive tailwind Reagan’s policies that simply don’t exist currently. As my partner, Michael Lebowitz, illustrated previously:
The Liberation of Mosul—A Massacre by Any Other Name
More than 40,000 civilians were killed in the devastating battle to retake Mosul from Isis, according to intelligence reports revealed exclusively to The Independent – a death toll far higher than previous estimates. Residents of the besieged city were killed by Iraqi ground forces attempting to force out militants, as well as by air strikes and Isis fighters, according to Kurdish intelligence services. Hoshyar Zebari, until recently a senior minister in Baghdad, told The Independent that many bodies “are still buried under the rubble”. “The level of human suffering is immense,” he said.
The Death Spiral of Financialization
The Plural of Anecdotes Is Beige (Book)
As noted before, the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book collection of local bank district anecdotes are fascinating for all the wrong reasons. What is revealed is not the state of the economy, but rather the state of how policymakers perceive or often wish the economy was at various points. If the 2007 Beige Books are a collective case study in denial, those in 2008 are of borderline delusion.
AG Sessions Moves to Make it Easier for the Feds to Steal Property of American Citizens
Civil asset forfeiture has been a key topic here at Liberty Blitzkrieg over the years for one very obvious reason. The practice has absolutely no place in any halfway humane and decent civilization. The fact that this barbaric, authoritarian practice somehow has legal protection in these United States says so much about the state of the nation and the level of thuggishness we’re willing to put up with as a people.
Washington D.C. Is Essentially Just A Gigantic Money Machine
If you have ever wondered why our leaders in Washington D.C. seem to act so strangely, the truth is that it almost always comes down to just one thing. It has been said that “money makes the world go round”, and that is definitely true in Washington. This year the federal government will spend more than 4 trillion dollars, and that represents well over one-fifth of our national GDP. With so much money coming in and so much money going out, the stakes are incredibly high, and that is why so much money is poured into political campaigns on the national level.
Why Would Republicans Repeal What Is Already Dying?
Legislation meant to give some Americans a lot for a little with a lot taken from others in return for very little was bound to fail. The ACA was plainly imploding as the constant rush of insurance companies out of ACA exchanges revealed in bright colors. Why abolish what the laws of economics were already abolishing?And that’s why the half-measures offered by Republican compromisers were plainly worse than simply doing nothing. Why legislate away one central plan in return for an allegedly improved central plan; essentially exchanging bad legislation for bad legislation on top of what already wasn’t working before 2010? The politics of repeal or partial repeal spoke to the horror of Washington doing anything to legislate a right to what was and is a market good like any other.
RussiaGate Report Ignored Iraq-WMD Lessons
January intelligence product has served as the basis for a series of Congressional hearings into the issue of Russian meddling into American elections — and has taken on a near canonical quality that precludes any critical questioning of either the authors or their findings. There is one major problem, however: the supposedly definitive assessment was not that which it proclaimed to be…….This deliberate misrepresentation of the organizational bona fides of the Russia NIA casts a shadow over the viability of the analysis used to underpin the assessments and judgments contained within. This is especially so when considered in the larger framework of what a proper “IC-coordinated assessment” process should look like, and in the aftermath of the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and the lessons learned from that experience, none of which were applied when it came to the Russia NIA.
