ratings

The story behind the deadly chemical explosion that rocked China’s Tianjin port last Wednesday continues to evolve amid fears that the public could be at risk from the hundreds of tonnes of sodium cyanide stored at the facility. Indeed, new samples show that the cyanide level in the water around the site is some 28 times the safety standard. It looks as though determining who actually owns Ruihai will be complicated by the fact that in China, it’s not uncommon for front men to hold shares on behalf of a company’s real owners. In an effort to pacify the country’s censored masses, party mouthpiece The People’s Daily said 10 people, including the head and deputy head of Ruihai had been detained since Thursday. Finally, initial estimates put the cost of the blast at bewteen $1 billion and $1.5 billion.

What happens when we roll back into the next official recession, unemployment soars, and consumers really stop spending? What is revealed when you look under the hood of this economic recovery is that it is a complete and utter fraud. The recovery is nothing but smoke and mirrors, buoyed by subprime auto debt, really subprime student loan debt, corporate stock buybacks, and Fed financed bubbles in stocks, real estate, and bonds. The four retailers listed below are nothing but zombies, kept alive by the Fed’s ZIRP and QE, as they stumble towards their ultimate deaths. The coming recession will be the knife through their skulls, putting them out of their misery.

The bond bubble is now well over $199 trillion in size. And if we were to include credit instruments that trade based on bonds, we’re well north of $600 trillion.

Anyone with any sense for global economic trends ought to be worried. The signs are everywhere of a serious deflationary crisis.

Republican kingmakers are nothing if not pragmatic, they want results for their money. They aren’t getting it. They are unhappy. They are angry. But like a chameleon changing colors, they want to be on the winning side. They all know Trump, they also know they can deal with Trump, so they will. The Blitzkrieg is over. Trump survived. The establishment sacrificed many of their finest media plants this past weekend. Every one of them ended up looking like exactly what they are, cheap desperate prostitutes, willing to say whatever was required of them, as long as their paychecks kept coming .

It appears efforts to form a coalition has failed as local nes report both the AKP and CHP will make separate statements from their party HQs.

For a few days, Fox News didn't know how to handle Donald Trump's "blood" comments about one of the network's favorite anchors. Then someone woke up and realized that if you're Fox, being boycotted by the GOP frontrunner simply isn't tenable.

On Monday, we got some color on Hillary Clinton’s $350 billion plan to make college more affordable. Students and former students across the country owe more than $1.2 trillion in college loans, and as Bill Ackman so eloquently put it earlier this year, "there’s no way they’re going to pay it back." Now, one Boston-based hedge fund is building a short position on what it says is "runaway inflation in post-secondary education."

The presumed Democratic nominee is set to roll out her plan to confront the $1.2 trillion student loan bubble. As Bloomberg reports, the pitch is expected to be one of the "biggest-ticket policy proposals of her presidential campaign," totaling some $350 billion and will include $200 billion for states who will be encouraged to do more to facilitate loan-free college educations and a $150 billion refi effort for the country’s heavily indebted students.

Washington hawks want regime change in Russia, no more and no less. Their hatred of Putin, who has the guts to have his own opinion of world affairs, and who stands firm for his country’s right to look after its security interests, makes him the ultimate evil. As for the huge crowd of presidential candidates, it looks like so far the only one who promises to fix the U.S. — Russia relations thus avoiding a looming disaster is Donald Trump. In his recent interview on CNN he said that he would be able to work well with the Russian president. No matter how the media and Republican Party establishment are trying to humiliate Trump, maybe he should be given a chance.

"There's a saying, 'if there's peace, it will start from Cizre, and if there's war, it will start from here as well.' And we can say we have a civil war in Turkey."

In April, we brought you the "FAKE-O" score or, as we delicately described it, "banks' brilliant plan to lend to deadbeats." Essentially, the "new score" will determine how creditworthy someone is by asking the utility company if the lights are still on and asking the phone company if the phone is still connected. But because that wasn’t (nearly) absurd enough, Facebook has a better idea...

Elements of the financial media are either unbelievably lazy or completely complicit in helping to maintain the illusion of success for the Centralized powers (large governments and Central Banks).

Reuters has taken an in depth look at Illinois' sprawling bureaucracy and discovered that the state "is home to nearly 8,500 local government units" which helps to explain why "the average homeowner pays taxes to six layers of government, and in Wauconda and many other places a lot more." The story also sheds quite a bit of light on why the state's fiscal crisis may ultimately prove to be intractable.