Meraglim Blog

Warnings From the “China Beige Book”

Jerome Powell Is the Safe Pick

North Korea is suffering an unusual and self-inflicted setback in its nuclear weapons development programs — “mountain fatigue.” North Korea uses underground facilities in Mount Mantap to test its nuclear detonations. The most recent test on Sept. 3 was of an H-bomb, North Korea’s most powerful yet, estimated to have produced a blast of up to 280

It’s not often we get to include an article from Popular Mechanics in our Five Links feature, since our editorial focus is financial. Yet in a world where the financial and geopolitical converge, an expert assessment of military forces of the kind provided in this article does have major implications for investors. The U.S. has a total of 11

The first cracks are starting to appear in China’s great wall of debt. The Chinese debt binge of the past 10 years is a well-known story. Chinese corporations have incurred dollar-denominated debts in the hundreds of billions of dollars, most of which are unpayable without subsidies from Beijing. China’s debt-to-equity ratio is over 300%, far

We’ve written before about how the bitcoin market is populated by drug dealers, money launderers, terrorists and worse. We’ve also written about how users buy, sell and store their bitcoins on “exchanges” that are really unregulated and unvetted computer networks that occasionally disappear or crash, taking their customers’ bitcoins with them. Tax authorities, securities regulators

The robot revolution on Wall Street, which combines huge processing power and artificial intelligence, is nothing new; it’s been going on for years. First, Wall Street automated routine payment-processing tasks and a large portion of back office settlement and clearing. Next came trading functions. Automated order entry and matching replaced humans who had formerly acted

Hope and Change at the Fed?

The Fed Is in Limbo

The Greatest Fear Today: The Lack of Fear