French customs officials received a tip that lead to the confiscation of a rare painting. The Guardian reported that French customs officers boarded a yacht docked off the town of Calvi in northern Corsica. They knew precisely what they were looking for: a €25 million Picasso belonging to a member of a Spanish banking dynasty. The Roman […]

Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has lowered the credit outlook for the EU as a whole to NEGATIVE. SPIEGEL Online reported, in addition to the new aid for Greece, one of the reasons for the negative rating includes the investment plan by President Juncker to spend more money. No one comprehends that increasing tax enforcement and raising taxes is not […]

The IMF has taken the position that it should put off any move to add the yuan to its Special Drawing Rights currency basket until September 2016. This seems to be political rather than economic. Then again, the IMF is acting far beyond what it was intended to do and is part of the Troika in Europe […]

  Thank you for sending copies of all the photos people took after “The Forecaster” premiere. They are greatly appreciated. I always like to retain the photos of the people I pose with.

None of the core Asian Equity Indices managed to trade in positive territory today: Nikkei (down 0.19%), Shanghai (-1.12%), and HSI (-0.92%). We saw weakness again in Asian currencies, and this mood worked its way in Europe as well. The first trading day in the Greek stock market after its official closure saw a 17% […]

Gold remains extremely weak. We need a daily closing above 1108 to say the low is temporarily in place and a bounce back up is possible. The 1080 level is critical support on a daily closing basis, and it remains possible that gold can break to the downside moving into September if the July low […]

Congress kicked the can down the road to precisely the ECM target date. This is when the government will go into shutdown mode. There is a greater than 50/50 chance that there will be no deal to extend the debt ceiling, which never ends. This merely reflects that there is no control over fiscal spending, […]

Anyone who thinks this is about terrorism is pathetically naive. The NSA is a top-notch Tax & Economic Espionage (TEE) organization; with terrorism so low on the agenda, it is laughable. You do not collect every phone call worldwide of billions of people to sort out even 100 terrorists. They store all that data and can input your name and […]

Saudi Arabia pumped a record 10.564 million barrels per day in June, showing that as prices decline, a record level of production is unfolding. Governments in the Middle East have budgets that are now in serious trouble. As oil prices decline, output is increasing beyond OPEC quotas because they need money to make up for lost revenue […]

Reuters is reporting that Merkel has decided to run for election once again in 2017. The longstanding joke in Germany is that either she will have to die while in office, or someone will have to drag her out. She would not know what to do if she was not in control of Germany, and thus […]