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Everyone seems to focus on gold's price while forgetting its value as a diversification.

While we have grown used to reading of Asian citizens setting themselves on fire in protest (most recently here), news that a 58-year-old man lit himself on fire in front of Ohio City Hall in Columbus is shocking. There are no details as to the reason for this sad act, but as ABC6 reports, the man has been transported to OSU Medical Center in critical condition.

"The BBC's Jonathan Head, who is at the scene, says there appear to be both dead and injured, amid a huge amount of chaos. There are burnt motorbikes on the main road, with paramedics and police trying to take the injured away, he says."

The Telegraph’s John Ficenec has written an excellent piece warning of a possible market crash in the coming weeks. He identifies eight key “signs things could get a whole lot worse.”  

It was a relatively quiet weekend out of China, where FX warfare has taken a back seat to evaluating the full damage from the Tianjin explosion which as we reported on Saturday has prompted the evacuation of a 3 km radius around the blast zone, and instead it was Japan that featured prominently in Sunday's headlines after its Q2 GDP tumbled by 1.6% (a number which would have been far worse had Japan used a correct deflator), and is now halfway to its fifth recession in the past 6 year, underscoring Abenomics complete success in desrtoying Japan's economy just to get a few rich people richer. Of course, economic disintegration is great news for stocks, and courtesy of the latest Yen collapse driven by the bad GDP data which has raised the likelihood of even more Japanese QE, the Nikkei closed 100 points, or 0.5% higher. 

"He’s now saying 'I won’t listen to the laws or constitution.' This is a very dangerous period. He wants to give a legal foundation to this coup he’s carried out. Those who carry out coups always do this: First they carry out the coup, then they give it a legal foundation.'"

Newly disclosed NSA files expose the spy agency's relationship through the years with American telecoms companies. As NYTimes reports, The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T. The documents, provided by the former agency contractor Edward Snowden, described the NSA-AT&T relationship as "highly collaborative," while another lauded the company’s "extreme willingness to help."

The following map lays out the embedded, and regulator blessed, latencies between the three big New Jersey exchange centers: Mahwah (NYSE), Secaucus (BATS), and Carteret (Nasdaq) for everyone but the top tier exchange clients, the HFTs, who are greenlighted to frontrun everyone else, and generate quarter after quarter of perfect trading records.

... and the ECB printing presses!

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

Chinese authorities ordered the evacuation of residents within a 3km radius of the Tianjin blast site “over fears of chemical contamination” according to BBC. According to a tweet by The People's Daily, anti-chemical warfare troops have entered the site to handle highly toxic sodium cyanide which had been found there.