Venezuela Defaults On A Debt Payment – Is This The First Domino To Fall?

Did you know that Venezuela just went into default?  This should be an absolutely enormous story, but the mainstream media is being very quiet about it.  Wall Street and other major financial centers around the globe could potentially be facing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, and the ripple effects could be felt for years to come.  Sovereign nations are not supposed to ever default on debt payments, and so this is a very rare occurrence indeed.  I have been writing about Venezuela for years, and now the crisis that has been raging in that nation threatens to escalate to an entirely new level. (Read More...)

California Residents On Edge After A Swarm Of 10 Earthquakes Hits Near The San Andreas Fault

Is the San Andreas Fault starting to wake up?  On Monday, a “swarm” of 10 significant earthquakes struck Monterey County, California.  The largest was a magnitude 4.6 earthquake that could be felt all the way over in San Francisco.  Of course this comes at a time when other portions of “the Ring of Fire” are starting to awaken as well.  For example, just yesterday I wrote about the alarming eruption of Mt. Popocatepetl that just took place down in Mexico.  For decades the west coast of North America has been relatively stable compared to the rest of the Ring of Fire, but now that is changing. (Read More...)

Why America’s Retail Apocalypse Could Accelerate Even More In 2018

Is the retail apocalypse in the United States about to go to a whole new level?  That is a frightening thing to consider, because the truth is that things are already quite bad.  We have already shattered the all-time record for store closings in a single year and we still have the rest of November and December to go.  Unfortunately, it truly does appear that things will get even worse in 2018, because a tremendous amount of high-yield retail debt is coming due next year.  In fact, Bloomberg is reporting that the amount of high-yield retail debt that will mature next year is approximately 19 times larger than the amount that matured this year… (Read More...)

Popocatepetl Violently Erupts, And Authorities Warn A Bigger Eruption Could Threaten More Than 20 Million People In Mexico City

Mt. Popocatepetl is one of the most important volcanoes on the entire planet, and yet most Americans are not familiar with it.  In ancient Aztec, Popocatepetl means “smoking mountain”, but to the locals the 5,426-meter-high volcano is simply known as “Don Goyo”.  A catastrophic eruption of “Don Goyo” would be a nightmare scenario for the more than 20 million people living in the Mexico City metropolitan area, and that is why authorities are watching Mt. Popocatepetl very closely at the moment.  In fact, we are being warned that the eruption that just took place could be a precursor to an even larger eruption… (Read More...)

This Is What A Pre-Crash Market Looks Like

The only other times in our history when stock prices have been this high relative to earnings, a horrifying stock market crash has always followed.  Will things be different for us this time?  We shall see, but without a doubt this is what a pre-crash market looks like.  This current bubble has been based on irrational euphoria that has been fueled by relentless central bank intervention, but now global central banks are removing the artificial life support in unison.  Meanwhile, the real economy continues to stumble along very unevenly.  This is the longest that the U.S. has ever gone without a year in which the economy grew by at least 3 percent, and many believe that the next recession is very close.  Stock prices cannot stay completely disconnected from economic reality forever, and once the bubble bursts the pain is going to be unlike anything that we have ever seen before. (Read More...)

Why Doesn’t The Left Give Our Veterans The Respect That They Deserve?

Our veterans deserve the very best, and yet way too often they get the very worst.  The Department of Veteran Affairs is a disaster, it takes forever to get claims processed, and VA facilities are often extremely dirty and poorly managed.  Rates of unemployment and suicide are far higher for veterans than they are for the population as a whole, and yet the left is strongly backing the NFL players as they disrespect our veterans when they refuse to stand for the national anthem.  There are more than 18 million veterans in the United States today, and more than 9 million of them (including my father) are over the age of 65.  As a society, it is time for us to make it exceedingly clear that we are not going to put up with mistreatment of our veterans any longer. (Read More...)

The Dow Falls By Triple Digits As Anxiety Over The Senate Tax Plan Grows

It is becoming quite clear that even if Congress passes a tax reform bill in 2017 that it won’t actually be that significant.  On Thursday, anxiety about the Senate’s version of the bill pushed the Dow down more than a hundred points, and that was the biggest decline that we have seen in two months.  Could it be possible that the massive stock market bubble that we are currently witnessing is about to burst?  Anticipation of what this tax bill would mean for U.S. companies has been the foundation for so much of the euphoria that was have seen on Wall Street this year, and now reality is starting to set in… (Read More...)

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos And Warren Buffett Have More Money Than The Poorest 50% Of The U.S. Population Combined

The problem is not that we have a few people that are rich – the problem is that we have so many that are poor.  As you will see below, three extremely wealthy individuals have as much money as the poorest half of the nation combined.  In a free market capitalist society, there are always going to be some that do better than others, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But in our society today, there are so few that are doing well.  At this point a majority of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and “one in five households have zero or negative net worth”… (Read More...)

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