Wall Street Journal

"To find the real source of the system's excessive fragility, the regulators will need to look much closer to home... The Federal Reserve remains the largest market manipulator ever, and the desperate yield-chasing, hair-trigger markets that it created were the primary cause of that crash and the inevitable ones yet to come."

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe awoke on Wednesday to find a half-meter-wide drone, contaminated with trace levels of radioactive cesium, on the roof of his office in Tokyo. Of course this is nothing new for Washington where a drone crash-landed on The White House lawn in January and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said that Japan is looking to tighten laws governing drones (ahead of next year's G7-summit and the 2020 Olympics). Of course, the police have explained cesium isn't harmful to humans (though we suspect they aren't stupid enough to drink it).

The People’s Bank of China may have tripled holdings of bullion since it last updated them in April 2009, to 3,510 metric tons. It is worth noting that the U.S. refuses to allow their gold reserves to be publicly audited and the Bundesbank is having difficulty repatriating much of its gold stored with the Federal Reserve. This has led many analysts to speculate that the U.S.’s gold reserves have been leased out or sold or are encumbered as part of an ongoing effort to manipulate gold prices.

Deposed former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was sentenced to 20 years in prison today in connection with a crackdown on protesters during demonstrations against his rule in late 2012. Morsi assumed the Presidency in 2012 after Hosni Mubarak was toppled a year earlier during the Arab Spring. Morsi's "democracy" lasted all of 4 months before he granted himself special autocratic powers triggering unrest that would eventually lead the military to assume power.

China is looking to succeed where the United States has failed. Beijing — which, as a reminder, claims it will not use its regional infrastructure development initiatives as a tool of foreign policy — is now set to facilitate the construction of nearly $50 billion in power plants, roads, and railways in neighboring Pakistan. The proposal, which will give China access to the Indian Ocean via the Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea, is part of President Xi Jinping’s ambitious “Silk Road” Economic Belt, and importantly, will likely include financing for the completion of the "Peace Pipeline," which will carry natural gas from Iranian gas fields across Pakistan.

Anthrax Was As Important As 9/11 In "Justifying" the War on Terror, the Iraq War, and the Patriot Act

In 2010, contrary to nearly every pundit, analyst and economist popularly published, I proclaimed ZIRP would starve the banks. Fast forward 5 years and banks are looking famished and things are getting worse 'casue more bailouts are coming before we finish ending the last bailout program (ZIRP) - The Federal Reserve has decided to let U.S. banks make limited use of municipal bonds to meet liquidity requirements

The dude that called the Pan-European Sovereign Debt Crisis in 2010 is making it clear that the ECB is playing with fire, but will never admit it's getting burned.

A look ahead into next week's macro forces.

Politics in America is controlled by money in America. But of course none of that, however accurate, makes it right.

It had to happen sooner or later... in the new normal of yield-reaching, collateral-shortage-ing, money-printing economalypse, the Swiss government has become the first ever to issue a 10Y sovereign bond at a negative yield. As WSJ notes, while several European countries have sold government debt at negative yields up to five years of maturity - which means investors effectively pay for the privilege of buying it - no other country has previously stretched this out as long as 10 years. Mission Accomplished Central Bankers?

The full breakdown of the biggest energy deal in the past decade and the 14th largest ever corporate takeover.

Previously, Elliott Management's Paul Singer has explained that he believes "there is one risk that stands way above the rest in terms of the scope of potential damage adjusted for the likelihood of occurrence" - an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Today we dig deeper into that risk... Why are we writing about EMP? Because in any analysis of societal risk, EMP stands all by itself.

"We hope that public figures in other countries can respect China's judicial sovereignty and independence," was the abrupt response from Beijing, clearly aimed at Hillary Clinton, after the yet-to-announce-her-run-for-president-ness, denounced as "inexcusable" the detention of five women activists. On suspicion of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", the five women face a jail sentence of up to five years, and so Clinton, using direct social media channels, tweeted, "The detention of women's activists in China must end. This is inexcusable". China's Foreign Ministry said the matter was an internal affair.

It appears time for the Oracle of Omaha to start pressing his bought-and-paid-for Washington well-be-dones as his immensely profitable rail freight business - built on the back of massive deflation-inducing malinvestment in US Shale businesses thanks to ZIRP and QE - is running out of steam. As WSJ reports, in March, oil-train traffic was down 7% on a year-over-year basis amid safety concerns and with lower crude prices, "the extra cost of rail makes it a tougher choice," notes on analyst, adding that the WTI-Brent spread needs to increase "for the economics of crude by rail" to make sense.