Middle East

"Najib has tarnished the country’s image in the world and caused investors to lose faith in the government. Malaysians do not believe in this prime minister."

"[Putin] hopes that when its ally Iran re-enters the global oil and gas market, Russia will somehow share in the profits, perhaps through new pipelines across Syria. He also wants to stop the Saudis from establishing export routes in Syria. Now that Russian energy supremacy in Europe also is at stake, Putin's determination to resolve the Syrian conflict on his terms can only grow."

Until Putin’s speech the world was intimidated by the Washington Bully. Resistance to Washington brought swift retribution. In the Middle East and Africa it brought economic sanctions and military invasions that destroyed entire countries. In France and other US vassal states it brought multi-billion dollar confiscations of bank net worth as the price of not following Washington’s policies toward other countries. Other countries felt powerless in the face of the arrogant hegemonic Unipower, which from time to time replied to noncompliance with threats. President Putin of Russia brought all that to end on September 28. He stood up before the world in the presence of the overflowing hubris of the hegemon and belled the cat.

It’s unfortunate that it took the corporate media all these years to" discover" that the United States and Russia are fighting a geopolitical proxy war in Syria. It remains to be seen how many more years and lost lives it will take for them to also "discover" that this proxy war is being fought over resources and power. It’s a sad state of affairs when the Western media provides humanitarian cover for the U.S. and NATO to fuel a brutal civil war simply to create economic advantages for NATO states and allies while undermining stability in the Middle East - creating the greatest humanitarian catastrophe since World War II. And as millions of refugees continue to pour out of Syria into Europe and abroad, the NATO-dominated public of the E.U. and U.S. remain largely ignorant to the fact their own governments helped create the refugee crisis they so abhor.

The US aircraft carrier, CVN-71, USS Theodore Roosevelt is currently on its way out of the Persian Gulf, leaving just the LHD-2 Essex Amphibious Warfare ship group to defend the Persian Gulf and more importantly, leaving the hotly contested middle east without U.S. carrier-based air support for the first time in years.

“Adulterous women will be stoned; thieves will have their hands chopped off!" 

"He told me, 'Your worst enemy has achieved this right to enrich. It's a right to enrich now that your friends are going to want, too, and we won't be the only country,'"...

"The market does not appear to be discounting negative knock-on effects. The outcome for recall costs and fines is unclear and largely depends on the engine performance post repair," said a Credit Suisse analyst in its report on the scandal. Estimates from Credit Suisse peg the costs of Dieselgate at a worst-case scenarios of $87 billion. This would make the VW scandal could be even bigger than Enron Scandal and BP Deepwater Scandal combined.

In the absence of any key economic developments in the Asian trading session, Asian stocks traded mostly under the influence of the late, pre-opex US ramp momentum courtesy of another day of ugly economic data in the US (bad econ news is good news for liquidity addicts), closing solidly in the green across the board, led by China (+1.6%) and Japan (+1.1%) thanks in no small part to the latest tumble in the Yen carry trade, which mirrored a bout of USD overnight weakness. And since a major part of the risk on move yesterday was due to Ewald Nowotny's comments welcoming more QE, news from Eurostat that Eurozone CPI in September dropped -0.1% confirming Europe's deflation continues, should only be greeted with even more buying as it suggests further easing by the ECB is inevitable.

Whatever the efforts of that expansive corps of intelligence analysts (and the vast intelligence edifice behind it), when anything happens in the Greater Middle East, you can essentially assume that the official American reaction, military and political, will be “surprise” and that policymakers will be left “scrambling” in a quagmire of ignorance to rescue American policy from the unexpected. The evidence, after all, is largely in.  In these years, for what now must be approaching three-quarters of a trillion dollars, the national security state and the military seem to have created an un-intelligence system.  Welcome to the fog of everything.

As has already been discussed at length, once the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the European Union on Iran begin to be lifted next year, there is going to be a surge in the already oversupplied global crude oil markets. Although the surge in crude oil markets could further worsen the global supply/demand gap, Iran could present a new source of competition on other crucial fronts too, especially in the gas markets.

The world is beginning to realize that a seachange in world affairs occured on September 28 when President Putin of Russia stated in his UN speech that Russia can no longer tolerate Washington’s vicious, stupid, and failed policies that have unleashed chaos, which is engulfing the Middle East and now Europe. Simply put, Washington’s impulsive use of power is a danger to America and to the world.

The Chairman of the House Armed Services, Mac Thornberry, slammed the Obama administration's policy on Syria in an interview published Monday.  Thornberry said that he could not recall anytime during his 20 years in Congress where Russia or any other country told the U.S. when and where American forces could fly in another country. Well, there is always a first time for everything...