International Forecaster Weekly

  And yet, as impressive as Rumsfeld's credentials as wheeler-dealer of our era are, they pale in comparison to the man who towered over late 19th and early 20th century America: J. P. Morgan.

A statement by Putin on Tuesday was read by the markets as a detente (despite the fact that the Russian Navy afterward blocked off the Kerch Strait separating the troubled Crimean region from Russia) and buying resumed apace.

Putin has been busy trashing his country’s reputation after a successful winter Olympics. In the last few hours, Putin now claims he is not there to wage war in the Ukraine, despite rushing to seize strategic Russian assets in the region.

Once most Americans believed the national economy was depressed, it became extremely difficult for government to overcome that belief and cause an economic recovery. Some people think the Great Depression would’ve lasted 5 to 10 years longer if WWII hadn’t begun and forced a dramatic change in public sentiment.

Right now, the Bitcoin community is going collectively insane trying to figure out what this all means. In one sense, this is about Mt. Gox and only directly impacts users who relied on that particular exchange.

James Corbett has four countries you should watch for in 2014. No doubt because you are going to be hearing more about them in the news and elsewhere. Countries that may not be in open revolt right now, but are likely the next up for real settling of accounts for actions, and who will likely be in some turmoil.

 This is a useful analogy to understand what the Fed, the BoJ, the BoE, the ECB, and just about every other major central bank on the planet is engaged in right now with their various easing and lending programs.

Why is the Fed tapering when virtually everyone with a functioning brain cell knows the economy is just barely limping by? Why is the Fed saying they’ll need to see poor data to end tapering, when we’ve had gobs of bad data and they’re explaining it away?

It was merely a joke, of course, delivered with the President's trademark ear-to-ear grin, but the sentiment no doubt reveals more truth about his mentality than he intended.

Why are bankers thowing themselves from windows now? By itself, any one of these deaths would have been ghastly enough. But taken together, this string of suicides brings with it a slew of worrying implications.

All of the news in recent days has been either worrying or harrowing. First there was the story of the banker suicides, with three influential banking executives ending up dead in the span of one week. We've seen equities markets across the board in freefall, with the Dow falling by triple figures on a daily basis and indexes around the world following suit.

... copyright is an outdated modality, but as long as it exists there needs to be a meaningful fair use clause to allow people to criticize, satirize or contextualize copyrighted material and to report on newsworthy material within copyrighted contents.

The truth may just be that the markets are in a fragile state right now. Investors are spooked by their own shadows as they head into a new year with the unknown quantity of a new Federal Reserve chair... the uncertainty surrounding the QE taper and new horror stories coming out of the Chinese shadow banking sector.

As anyone who has been following China's economic growth in recent years knows, much of that growth in the past 5 years has been built on easy credit from the People's Bank of China and is causing real problems for the economy as a whole.

It’s the game folks. A global adaptation of monopoly and poker rolled into one. Up front in the “public” they simply do what all the other Criminal nations do.