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Donald Trump railed against the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a candidate, and now he plans to do far more as president. Trump said Monday in a video address that he would announce a US is withdrawing from the pact on his first day in office. Trump called the pact, a deal among the US and 11 Pacific Rim nations, "a potential disaster" for the nation. "Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back to Amerian shores," he said. Earlier Monday, Japan's prime minister discounted the idea of going ahead with the TPP without American participation,...

For believers in small government, there is a ray of hope on the horizon. We have a (nominally) Republican president-elect who loves to point out how he is not beholden to the usual special interests and Republican majorities in both the House and Senate. If federal spending is ever going to be reined in, now would appear to be the time. Federal spending for the 2016 fiscal year ran about $3.95 trillion, a record high. Without any spending cuts, federal spending is projected at $4.15 trillion for the current fiscal year which started on October 1 and runs through September...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Boies, 75, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Read: ‘Fraud is not a trade secret’: How a 27-year-old blew the whistle...

While many of us in the alternative media and especially those researchers of Clinton crimes are breathing a big fat sigh of relief that anybody but Hillary is headed to the White House in 2017, Brandon Smith of Alt Market is warning us all not to get too comfortable… and with history on his side here, we should listen to him. Despite what looked like a rigged, fraudulent Hillary win orchestrated from the top down with the entire establishment machine behind her, Trump won the election. In an election year that would have otherwise seen record low voter turnout, the...

Tyler DurdenNovember 19, 2016 India's 'de-monetization' scheme has caused chaos across the nation, and while SocGen says the government's plan may have some short-term success in curbing so-called 'black-money', investors should "brace for economic disruption" as Bloomberg reports the Indian government is considering a cap on cash holdings for individuals. As SocGen concludes, "people will now be more inclined to park their black income in gold rather than in currency." The daily images of utter chaos in India that has brought the conutry's economy to a standstill since they unleashed their war on cash... Are perhaps about to get worse,...

...America—a country defined by the promise that whoever you are, you have the same chance as anyone else to rise, with pluck, industry, and talent. But they imagine wrong. The U.S. today lags behind many of its First World rivals in terms of mobility. A class society has inserted itself within the folds of what was once a classless country, and a dominant New Class—as social critic Christopher Lasch called it—has pulled up the ladder of social advancement behind it.... ...A complacent Republican establishment denies this change has occurred. If they don’t get it, however, American voters do. For the...

The energy industry and labor movement don’t often agree on much, but after one of the most contentious elections in memory, a group of experts from both sides found that they can unify around one thing: infrastructure. Throughout the 2016 campaign, infrastructure expansion was perhaps the only policy issue with bipartisan support. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump proposed plans in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, with Trump’s election and Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, large amounts of private and government funds may flow into public works projects to upgrade the nation’s crumbling roads, bridges...

Regulation: One of the biggest myths standing in the way of dismantling the Dodd-Frank law is that it somehow reversed the Republicans' "deregulation" of the financial sector in the late 1990s. This is entirely false. Lawmakers are in a desperate tizzy... ...Democrats' narrative about the financial crisis, which goes as follows: In the late 1990s, mean Republicans took advantage of an impeachment-weakened President Clinton and passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, deregulating the banks and setting off a massive, speculative boom in real estate lending fueled by unbridled Wall Street greed. By 2008, the excesses of these eight years of greed exploded,...

"Turning his trade-bashing campaign talks into actual policies could bash any hope that the Asia-Pacific will finally have its much-wanted free trade deal," said a commentary in the official Xinhua news agency on Saturday. "Worse, it could drag his country and the wider world into deeper economic distress," added the agency, which is a barometer of government thinking. ... China's Xi is selling an alternate vision for regional trade by promoting the Beijing-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which as it stands excludes the Americas. Chinese state media has warned Trump against isolationism and interventionism, calling instead for the United...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

Litigator David Boies and the law firm he founded, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, have stopped doing legal work for Theranos Inc. after disagreeing about the strategy for handling ongoing government investigations of the blood-testing company, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Boies, 75 years old, has been one of the country’s best-known litigators since the late 1990s. He became Theranos’s outside counsel after being approached in 2011 by two investors in the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. He fiercely defended Theranos against questions about its technology and operations. Those efforts included threatening to take legal action against The...

It's worth asking why Elizabeth Holmes is still leading the embattled blood testing company Theranos Inc. But there may be a good reason why she still is in charge, one that has little to do with the scandal-ridden company's performance to date. Forget what venture capitalist Tim Draper — one of the first to invest in the Palo Alto company — implied this week that Holmes is being attacked because she's a young, female entrepreneur. The simple fact is that Theranos has not been able to deliver on its technology from a commercial, scientific or regulatory standpoint, and that falls...

Some on the British Right see Donald Trump's election victory – following a campaign steeped in an appeal to white nativism – as heralding a transatlantic Anglo-Saxon resurgence. But, if anything, it indicates that America's destiny, and thus the world's, will continue to grow entwined with Asia's – and, in Trump's own estimation, with India's in particular. “Abki baar, Trump sarkaar!” (“This time, Trump government!”), the candidate announced in Hindi in his televised Diwali greeting to Indian-Americans, borrowing from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's own campaign slogan. He also gave a fifteen-minute address before thousands at a Hindu-American rally, in...

With Silicon Valley CEOs terrified that President Donald Trump will retaliate against offshoring production, Apple is already preparing to move iPhone production back to America. The Nikkei Asian Review reported: “Apple asked both Foxconn and Pegatron Corp., the two iPhone assemblers, in June to look into making iPhones in the U.S.,” a source said. “Foxconn complied, while Pegatron declined to formulate such a plan due to cost concerns.” As Breitbart News reported, candidate Donald Trump, while speaking at Liberty University in January, said, “We’re going to get Apple Computer to build their damn computers and things in this country, instead...

Seemingly overlooked amid the simple tweet presented by Donald Trump last evening was the glaringly obvious: the President Elect, after winning the White House, is directly talking to the Chairman of the Ford Motor Company.

The U.S. economy got several positive signs Thursday, as a raft of reports showed jobless claims were down, new home construction reached a nine-year high, manufacturing activity stayed on the plus side and inflation seemed to be returning to normal levels. Jobless Claims The fewest Americans since 1973 filed for unemployment benefits last week, a sign that the U.S. labor market is getting tighter. Jobless claims dropped by 19,000 to 235,000 in the week ended Nov. 12, which included the Veterans Day holiday, a Labor Department report showed Thursday in Washington. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey called for...

Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen reiterated Thursday that the case for an interest rate hike has strengthened and said that it would be "appropriate relatively soon," reinforcing expectations for an increase at next month's policy meeting. Yellen's testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress was her first major comments since the election of Donald Trump, who has has criticized the Fed chief's actions. Yellen said she expects to serve out her full term and cautioned against reversing financial reforms. Yellen said in her testimony: "I expect economic growth to continue at a moderate pace sufficient to generate some further...

Donald Trump and Janet Yellen don’t share much common ground. The president-elect and the Federal Reserve Chair have clashed over Trump’s claims that the Fed was picking sides in the election. He has also at times criticized the Fed’s recent easy-money policies as creating a “false economy.” But during a hearing before the Joint Economic Committee on Thursday, the Fed Chair indicated an area where she might welcome Trumpian reforms. During her testimony, Yellen argued that there were two worrying trends in the American economy: slow productivity growth and lackluster business investment. “My advice [to lawmakers] would be to [pursue...

2016 has not been too kind to Elizabeth Holmes, the Steve-Jobs wannabe in charge of fraudulent Theranos. She has thus far been banned for 2 years from operating labs, removed from hosting fundraisers for Hillary and lost her entire net worth. And now, the Wall Street Journal has published the "tell-all" story of the whistle-blower, 26 year old Tyler Shultz, who brought the the whole Theranos farce crashing down. It's a sordid tale complete with all the expected twists and turns of a Jason Bourne thriller including intimidation, coercion and private detectives. Tyler Shultz is the grandson of George Shultz,...

Economy: If we heard anything about Donald Trump's proposals from mainstream economists before the election, it was that he'd send the economy into a tailspin. Now, after Trump's Nov. 8 victory, they are suddenly revising their forecasts upward. Go figure. When it was clear that Trump was going to win the election early Wednesday morning last week and stock futures had dropped, one-time economist Paul Krugman made this prediction: "If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never." We are, he went on, "probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight." Two days...