President Obama

It would appear the most transparent administration ever is in trouble with an 'ally' once again. Following its wrist-slap from France last week, and its previous quasi-admission of spying on Merkel and her senior officials (which we are sure President Obama said would never happen again - better to ask for forgiveness than permission?), The Guardian reports Angela Merkel’s chief of staff has asked the US ambassador for a meeting to discuss the latest reports of alleged US spying on Germany.

America’s grand strategy, its long-term blueprint for advancing national interests and countering major adversaries, is in total disarray. Top officials lurch from crisis to crisis, improvising strategies as they go, but rarely pursuing a consistent set of policies. Some blame this indecisiveness on a lack of resolve at the White House, but the real reason lies deeper. It lurks in a disagreement among foreign policy elites over whether Russia or China constitutes America’s principal great-power adversary.

Four months after the UK opened the membership floodgates and dealt Washington a humiliating political blow, China has officially launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Have you picked up on the new trope du jour? We are all encouraged to bask in our innocence as we lament the advent of a new Cold War. The thought has been in the wind for more than a year, of course, at least among some of us. But we witness a significant turn, and I hope this same some of us are paying attention. As of this week, leaders who know nothing about leading, thinkers who do not think and opinion-shaping poseurs such as Tom Friedman are confident enough in their case to sally forth with it: The Cold War returns, the Russians have restarted it and we must do the right thing - the right thing being to bring NATO troops and materiel up to Russia’s borders, pandering to the paranoia of the former Soviet satellites as if they alone have access to some truth not available to the rest of us.

"A judicial victory doesn’t automatically translate into a political victory, let alone a policy success."

In a free society, debate is over only when the people decide it’s over.

As we await the final capitulation by the ECB, EU and IMF to provide Greece another bailout (or not), we have assembled a list of reading for you that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with Greece.

"You're cruisin' for a bruisin'." - Kenickie, Quote From "Grease"

Following yesterday's historic 6:3 Supreme Court decision enshrining the tax known as Obamacare, there was little surprise moments ago when in one of its last remaining decisions in re: Obergefell v. Hodges, the most liberal Supreme Court since 1960 just declared gay marriage legal nationwide. The decision, supported by all the women on the SCOTUS, came down in a 5:4 vote with Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan, Breyer and Kenedy voting for, while Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito dissented.

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday (June 25) in favor of the Obama Administration's current implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), denying claims from challengers that health insurance subsidies were improperly paid for enrollees in states that did not operate their own health insurance exchanges. Goldman explains what it means... (spoiler alert: more healthcare consumption - which translated means higher healthcare costs).

The Supreme Court has ruled that people who bought healthcare coverage through federal exchanges as part of Obamacare can keep subsidies that effectively limit the amount low- and middle-income Americans pay for health insurance to 9.5% of their income or less.

President Obama is due to take the lectern to gloat address the decision of "the most liberal Supreme Court since the 60s" upholding his healthcare tax...saying that subsidies do not violate state law. Drink every time he smiles, says "right decision", "bipartisan", and neck the whole bottle of tequila if mentions that "justice was done," or uses the term "SCOTUSCare."

Chaos reigns, with contradictory headlines pushing and pulling futures in any one direction, only for the next headline to undo the previous one. And only headline scanning frontrunning algos have any chance of trading any of this...

The federal personnel chief said Tuesday that she does not believe “anyone is personally responsible” for the massive hack of federal employee data and security clearance files.

Translation - no one is accountable, it was a glitch.

Echoing the era of McCarthyism, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.

While French president Hollande is busy "grilling" (in the words of The Local) president Obama over the latest US "spying on its allies" snafu, the French economy continues to deteriorate and according to the latest French labor ministry data, in May the number of French jobseekers rose by another 0.5%, or 16,200, to 3.552 million, 10k more than expected, and a new all time high.