Economics and Investing:

The Curious Case Of The 550 Million Missing Barrels Of Crude Oil

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Commercial property bubble gets out of control: Commercial real estate is now up 102 percent from the lows reached in 2009.

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Items from Professor Preponomics:

US News

Demand Agencies Go to the Chopping Block (Government Waste Fraud and Abuse) This is an excellent opinion piece written by columnist Cal Thomas. Excerpt: “We live in troubled times. The institutions we once trusted no longer seem reliable.”

Feds Paid $709,000 to Academic Who Studies How Glaciers are Sexist (Daily Caller) “Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems…” Meanwhile, the U.S. Debt Clock/a> keeps on ticking!

International News

It’s Time to Dump Non-Market Economy Treatment (Cato)

Exclusive: China to Ease Commercial Banks’ Bad Debt Burden via Equity Swaps – Sources (Reuters) Excerpt: “The quality of assets held by banks is worse than it looks, analysts have said. To avoid stumping up capital and to protect their balance sheets, some banks have under-reported bad loans and under-recognized overdue debt.”

The Collapse of Italy’s Banks Threatens to Plunge the European Financial System into Chaos (The Economic Collapse Blog)

ECB Pulls Out All Stops with Rate Cuts, Stimulus Boost (Reuters)

Personal Economics and Household Finance

Failed Obamacare Co-ops Have Not Repaid $1.2B in Federal Loans, Docs Say (Fox News) Prepare yourselves and your budgets. More health insurance premium hikes are coming. Excerpt: “In some states, these losses will be absorbed by other insurance companies—which means, by the policyholders of other insurance companies who have to pay increased … premiums…. “In other states, doctors, hospitals and individual patients stand to suffer large out-of-pocket losses due to the co-op failures….”

Alabamians’ ObamaCare Deductible are Rising Again in 2016; Here’s How Much (Yellow Hammer News) Alabama is not alone.

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