Washington D.C.

Saudi Arabia, the recently crowned head of a UN human rights panel and close U.S. government ally, has now bombed two wedding parties in Yemen in just over a week. Yes, you read that right.

If you make it so burdensome to operate a legit business, then you're basically giving people without big lines of credit and capital few choices but to work in the cash-only underground economy.

If you’re a fan of dovish policymakers who are committed to Keynesian insanity, you can always count on Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota who is out today with the latest hint that NIRP is coming to America.

"The Saudi population, especially the younger people, are growing restless because they see what is happening in the world through social media of which they are among the highest users - that’s the only means they have to communicate. So the situation inside the country is also very fragile and the foreign policy conducted by the current regime is very perilous. It is only a matter of time because the Gulf States are ruled by oligarchies who maintain control through bribery and the sword. So this is a challenging time for the Gulf States despite all the public commentary suggesting they are immune to the uprisings."

"The think tanks do not disclose the terms of the agreements they have reached with foreign governments. And they have not registered with the United States government as representatives of the donor countries, an omission that appears, in some cases, to be a violation of federal law, according to several legal specialists who examined the agreements at the request of The Times... As a result, policy makers who rely on think tanks are often unaware of the role of foreign governments in funding the research."

Unfortunately, we are used to politicians saying whatever they think they need to say to be elected president, and falling way short of their campaign promises on the job. Even scarier would be the notion of selling America to the craftiest bidder. The election may be more than a year away, but isn’t it time to dig beneath the carefully crafted persona that is Trump and unearth the person and the full spectrum of his business dealings? To see the real Donald Trump is to plunge into all the conflicts of interest he denies, the financial tricks he dispenses, the crucial details he obfuscates, and the flimflam he offers up day in, day out.

While the US coast guard and search and rescue teams scour the Caribbean seas around the Bahamas for traces of debris from the missing cargo ship El Faro, which disappeared in the eye of Hurricane Joaquin with 33 mostly American crew members aboard more than three days ago, another tragedy struck moments ago when as AP reported an Amtrak train derailed in central Vermont near Northfield. It isn't immediately clear whether there are any injuries.

Q. Should somebody have gone to jail.

Bernanke: Yeah, yeah I think so. It would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual actions as obviously everything that went wrong, or was illegal, was done by some individial not by an abstract firm.

Did Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott just lose his job because of fears that a probe and audit of the "data" and "statistics" behind global warming could threaten to destroy Goldman Sachs' best laid cap-and-trade, emissions trading scheme and carbon tax plans?

This is the sort of thing you’d expect to see in a Banana Republic. Which makes perfect sense, because America is a Banana Republic.

It is time for a radical denationalization of money, a privatization of the monetary and banking system through a separation of government from money and all forms of financial intermediation. That is the pathway to ending the cycles of booms and busts, and creating the market-based institutional framework for sustainable economic growth and betterment. It is time for monetary freedom to replace the out-of-date belief in government monetary central planning.

“Most Texans do not want to break away from the United States. Most Texans consider themselves Americans. But if ever being American means sacrificing our liberties, we will just prefer to be Texans.”

"It’s fairly obvious that we reached peak trade in 2007"...

The "real" Donald Trump revealed once again...

"We’re exhausted by your antics and empty promises. If we so much as sniff continued nuclear development, we are going to covertly and overtly stop you, even if that means military action and pre-emptive strikes on your nuclear facilities."