Economy

...Until now a full picture of global debt was missing. The October 2016 Fiscal Monitor has, for the first time, put a number on the size of debt covering virtually the whole world and the picture is not pretty.

Janet Yellen and her merry band of money printers are oblivious to the dangerous speculation and valuation excesses that their policies have implanted throughout the financial system. No wonder the Trump voters want to throw the bums out. It is none too soon.

We desperately need to repair and replace a vast part of our national infrastructure but where do we get the money? Well, the U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to fix Iraq and Afghanistan and God knows how many more hundreds of billions of dollars over the years on other projects around the world so what if we renewed the focus on our own needs?. [In this article I identify our infrastructure shortfalls and present a way to pay for the needed projects which, combined with my proposed specific massive tax reform, could reposition the country to be the most powerfully competitive nation in the world.

...Whenever a country (or countries) creates debt that is beyond the level that they can ever repay, an economic collapse is a near-certainty. Today, many jurisdictions, particularly, the US, EU, UK, Canada, etc. have created debt that is far beyond anything the world has ever seen. This assures us that the corresponding collapse will be of epic proportions.

Monitoring how Beijing is managing China's slowdown, and whether it will be able to rebalance its growth, are highly important as weakness in China will weigh on U.S. stocks. Given the ongoing structural reforms, government policies and global economic conditions, certain sectors within China have surfaced as winners while some are surprisingly becoming losers, which provide long-term investing opportunities. This article identifies the sectors that are winning, losing and remaining neutral.

Economic expert and best-selling author, David Stockman, offers a dire view of the deep financial trouble America faces in his new book titled “Trumped!” in which he is quoted as saying "The rubes are revolting, and they are revolting because they can see the system is rigged. These people are fed up, and they have had enough, and I think this is where Trump is coming from. I think we are at an inflection point where someone is finally challenging the Wall Street/Washington elites. Trump is kind of a wild man in some ways, but he hasn’t spent the last 30 years in Washington drinking the Kool-Aid."

Donald Trump is promising change, and many of his proposals sound good (and, yes, there are also some areas to be concerned about), but Trump's plan stops well short of the fundamental overhaul of our economic and financial systems that is required. That being said, what he is proposing is vastly superior to Hillary Clinton’s plan so he should definitely be applauded for at least moving in the right direction. Below are some of his economic proposals "to save the U.S. economy."

It’s no longer a question of when the peso will breach the once unheard-of level of 20 to the dollar. It’s when.

The deterioration of the federal budget began in slow fashion over a year ago, and it's now become obvious. The deficit is still quite manageable but spending is firming while revenues are stagnating. The public sector is growing while the private sector struggles. Here are some updated charts that speak for themselves:

When numbers get into the billions or trillions, they start to lose context. The U.S. national debt is one of those numbers. It currently sits at $19.5 trillion, which is actually such a large number that it is truly difficult for the average person to comprehend so today’s data visualization plots the U.S. national debt against everything from the assets managed by the world’s largest money managers, to the annual value of gold production.