The main suspect in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers residence at a U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia has been captured after nearly 20 years on the run, a Saudi-owned newspaper reported on Wednesday.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/26/us-saudi-security-usa-idUSKCN0QV0PL20150826
China claims most of the South China Sea. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei also have overlapping claims.
Read more: http://sputniknews.com/us/20150826/1026236350.html#ixzz3jymhADye
Voltaire Gazmin said he asked Admiral Harris to help protect the transport of Filipino troops and supplies to Philippine-occupied reefs in the South China Sea by deploying American patrol planes to discourage Chinese moves to block the resupply missions, the Associated Press reported.
“If there are Americans flying around there, we won’t be troubled,” Gazmin said. “We need to be helped in our resupply missions. The best way they could assist is through their presence.”
Gazmin said Harris assured him of US readiness to provide assistance, the AP reported.
Beijing has repeatedly urged Washington not to take sides in the escalating maritime dispute in the region. Last month, China’s Defense Ministry accused the United States of ‘militarizing’ the South China Sea by taking part in such military drills.
http://www.infowars.com/us-plans-more-anti-china-drills-in-asia-pacific/
REGULATORY NEWS, BREAKINGVIEWS
Ten of the world’s biggest automakers were sued on Wednesday by U.S. consumers who claim they concealed the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning in more than 5 million vehicles equipped with keyless ignitions, leading to 13 deaths.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/26/us-autos-ignition-lawsuit-idUSKCN0QV1PH20150826
During more than a week of stock market sell-offs, investors have been exhorted to use declines to pick up bargains – and with a 7.7 percent drop on the S&P 500 since August 17, stocks have certainly gotten less expensive.
To determine how cheap they are, investment pros look at yields, earnings and more. By several of those metrics, the bottom line is this: U.S. stocks are not wildly expensive, but they are not the screaming bargains that might pull value-minded investors back into the market.
“We are not getting to a point where it’s attractive, it’s just not as expensive,” said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading in Greenwich, Connecticut.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/26/us-markets-global-valuation-idUSKCN0QV2GF20150826
Though Southeast Asian stocks saw a slight rebound Wednesday following overnight interest rate cuts by China’s central bank, the gains were too modest to wipe out the losses from the previous two days.
Blue chips across the region were sold as anxiety over weakening currencies and cheaper commodities lingered. Of the 122 major companies selected by the Nikkei Asian Review as the “ASEAN 100,” 97 were losers — led by Malaysia’s AirAsia, which fell nearly 20% over the three days.
Risk-hedging investors shunned the low-cost carrier on worries about its ability to raise funds at its Indonesian subsidiary. AirAsia may be banned from operating in Indonesia if it fails to raise $150 million by Sept. 20, following new requirements from Indonesia’s transport ministry to pump up capital to ensure aviation safety. The subsidiary had a negative equity position of 3.035 trillion rupiah ($220 million) as of March 31.
http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/AC/ASEAN-blue-chips-resource-stocks-hammered-despite-China-rate-cut
Omitted from the headline blame game in FT and other business-news coverage was that US equity markets had been trending down since late July. Yet, as the global stock plunge accelerated over the next few weeks, and with the yuan devaluation story fading from the news, the business media blamed the selloff on China’s economic woes and how its slowing economy was impacting the global economy.
China just arrested 15,000 people as part of a censorship campaign, but the FEC nearly enacted Chinese-style censorship for campaigns 10 months ago.
http://www.infowars.com/chinese-style-censorship-alive-and-well-in-america/
It was not only the sharpness and depth of the depression that stunned the world and changed the face of modern history: it was the length, the chronic economic morass persisting throughout the 1930s, that caused intellectuals and the general public to despair of the market economy and the capitalist system.
Previous depressions, no matter how sharp, generally lasted no more than a year or two. But now, for over a decade, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness led millions to seek some new economic system that would cure the depression and avoid a repetition of it.
Political solutions and panaceas differed. For some it was Marxian socialism — for others, one or another form of fascism. In the United States the accepted solution was a Keynesian mixed-economy or welfare-warfare state. Harvard was the focus of Keynesian economics in the United States, and Seymour Harris, a prominent Keynesian teaching there, titled one of his many books Saving American Capitalism. That title encapsulated the spirit of the New Deal reformers of the ’30s and ’40s. By the massive use of state power and government spending, capitalism was going to be saved from the challenges of communism and fascism.
One point is undisputed: the autocratic ruler of the Federal Reserve System, from its inception in 1914 to his death in 1928, was Benjamin Strong, a New York banker who had been named governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Strong consistently and repeatedly used his power to force an inflationary increase of money and bank credit in the American economy, thereby driving prices higher than they would have been and stimulating disastrous booms in the stock and real-estate markets. In 1927, Strong gaily told a French central banker that he was going to give “a little coup de whiskey to the stock market.” What was the point? Why did Strong pursue a policy that now can seem only heedless, dangerous, and recklessly extravagant?
Once the government has assumed absolute control of the money-creating machinery in society, it benefits — as would any other group — by using that power. Anyone would benefit, at least in the short run, by printing or creating new money for his own use or for the use of his economic or political allies.
Strong had several motives for supporting an inflationary boom in the 1920s. One was to stimulate foreign loans and foreign exports. The Republican party was committed to a policy of partnership of government and industry, and to subsidizing domestic and export firms. A protective tariff aided inefficient domestic producers by keeping out foreign competition. But if foreigners were shut out of our markets, how in the world were they going to buy our exports? The Republican administration thought it had solved this dilemma by stimulating American loans to foreigners so that they could buy our products.
A fine solution in the short run, but how were these loans to be kept up, and, more important, how were they to be repaid? The banking community was also confronted with the curious and ultimately self-defeating policy of preventing foreigners from selling us their products, and then lending them the money to keep buying ours. Benjamin Strong’s inflationary policy meant repeated doses of cheap credit to stimulate this foreign lending. It should also be noted that this policy subsidized American investment banks in making foreign loans.
Among the exports stimulated by cheap credit and foreign loans were farm products. American agriculture, overstimulated by the swollen demands of warring European nations during World War I, was a chronically sick industry during the 1920s. It had awakened after the resumption of peace to find that farm prices had fallen and that European demand was down. Rather than adjusting to postwar realities, however, American farmers preferred to organize and agitate to force taxpayers and consumers to keep them in the style to which they had become accustomed during the palmy “parity” years of the war. One way for the federal government to bow to this political pressure was to stimulate foreign loans and hence to encourage foreign purchases of American farm products.
The “farm bloc,” it should be noted, included not only farmers; more indirect and considerably less rustic interests were also busily at work. The postwar farm bloc gained strong support from George N. Peek and General Hugh S. Johnson; both, later prominent in the New Deal, were heads of the Moline Plow Company, a major manufacturer of farm machinery that stood to benefit handsomely from government subsidies to farmers. When Herbert Hoover, in one of his first acts as president — considerably before the crash — established the Federal Farm Board to raise farm prices, he installed as head of the FFB Alexander Legge, chairman of International Harvester, the nation’s leading producer of farm machinery. Such was the Republican devotion to “laissez faire.”
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