During a closed-door and off-the-record meeting last week, top Facebook executive Campbell Brown reportedly warned news publishers that refusal to cooperate with the tech behemoth’s efforts to “revitalize journalism” will leave media outlets dying “like in a hospice.” CLICK for complete article

As Jim Rickards put it in a recent column, there’s a lot of “happy talk” coming out of Washington D.C.

To hear Donald Trump tell it, we might be in the midst of the greatest US economy in history. When the Q2 GDP number came in at 4.1%, the president called it “an economic turnaround of historic proportions.” Of course, Trump isn’t alone in his optimistic hyperbole. Politicians and pundits all across the mainstream keep telling us everything is great. They see growth from horizon to horizon. Employment is booming. Americans are spending.

The problem with all the happy talk is that it doesn’t have much to do with reality. The Trump economy looks pretty much like the Obama economy…. CLICK for complete article

Back in March, President Trump first introduced the idea of a US “space force”, renewing a long-running debate that began almost 20 years ago whether the Pentagon’s space activities should be moved to a new command. 

Fast forward to today, when Vice President Mike Pence announced the first steps in the creation of a space force as a entirely new military branch…. CLICK for complete article

Amid fears of escalating global trade wars, the European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat has registered a tangible slowdown in the first half of the year, with the quarterly GDP inching up a mere 0.4 percent in both the first and the second quarter–a clear drop from the bullish 0.6 to 0.7 percent quarterly growth seen last year.

Meanwhile, the Brexit-bound UK registered the slowest pace in its economy in more than five years…. CLICK for complete article

The FT reports that the Saudi central bank and state pension funds have instructed their overseas asset managers to dispose of their Canadian equities, bonds and cash holdings “no matter the cost.”

Third-party managers are estimated to be mandated to invest more than $100bn of Saudi funds in global markets, executives say. While the proportion of that figure invested in Canadian holdings would be “fairly small in absolute terms,” the asset sale sent a strong message, one of the people said…. CLICK for complete article