It might be hot weather. It might be the fact all the really important people are away from their desks. Or it might be pure coincidence. Whatever the explanation, there is no denying that August is the month when the cracks in the financial system start to show through.

1: The Bank of England relaunches QE

When it meets this week, the Monetary Policy Committee is widely expected to cut interest rates, and it might well give us a fresh blast of printed money. Why? Because it feels it needs to counter a possible post-Brexit slowdown in the economy.

2: A Trump surge

Hillary Clinton has seen a modest bounce in the polls, following the Democrats’ convention – she is currently six points ahead, on the latest numbers. And yet, the fact remains that this is going to be a very tight presidential race. Last week several polls showed Donald Trump with a narrow lead. Most experts dismissed his candidacy from the start, but he has kept in the race. As August comes to a close, unless Clinton is way out in front, investors are going to start wondering whether he might actually win.

3: A unicorn fund-raising disappoints

According to VentureBeat, there are now 229 unicorns – that is tech start-ups worth more than $1 billion. Vast sums of money have been tied up in some very new, untested business. Some of them will be fantastic success stories. But history tells us for every major winner there are a dozen big failures. If one of the major unicorns falters, that could trigger a wave of panic selling – and in illiquid markets, that always causes a crash.

4: A German bank fails

Despite the latest stress tests, the markets have already assumed Italy’s banks are bust. They can take that in their stride. But a German bank?

Deutsche Bank’s share price has been looking horrible all year – this week, the shares are trading at under €12, a multi-year low (they are down from €33 in 2014, and €100 a decade ago). Commerzbank – down from €12 to less than €6 in the last year – doesn’t look a lot better. True, the markets might have got that wrong. But the price tells you something very nasty is brewing in Germany’s financial system.

5: The Shanghai market shuts

It was China that led the downturn last August, with frenetic trading as small investors tried to get out. The Chinese treat the stock market as a casino, except without the bright lights and cocktail waitresses – and they are inveterate gamblers. After declining for six months after the crash, the Chinese market has been on a surge again, getting back to the 3,000 level after dropping to 2,500. But it remains volatile, and none of the worries about China’s over-heated economy has gone away – while the impact of a protectionist Trump White House has still to be reckoned with. If investors suddenly get out, and the market is shut for a few days, that will create tremors globally.

Not every August sees a correction in the markets. Sometimes investors can sail through without anything to disturb anyone. But most do, and if the month is starting with valuations already at record highs, or close to them, then a wobble, and perhaps a crash, seems more likely than not. If it happens, then those are the five most likely triggers.

And of course things have already started to get a bit ominous for those holding stocks over the last week and a half. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has now closed down for seven days in a row, and that is the longest losing streak that we have seen since the panic of last August. Over the past 12 months we have seen virtually every other major global stock market experience at least one major crash. Could the US markets be next?

What Trump told Fox Business earlier today was actually right on the money. Our financial markets have been artificially inflated by the Federal Reserve, and all artificial bubbles of this nature eventually burst. And if you don’t want to believe Donald Trump, I would encourage you to consider what Jeffrey Gundlach, the chief executive of DoubleLine Capital, has been saying. He has been right about the markets in recent years over and over again, and just a few days ago he publicly stated that “stocks should be down massively” and that now is the time to “sell everything”.

Unfortunately, very few people are likely to change course at this stage. Most of those that could see the warning signs have already gotten out of the market, and those that prefer to have blind faith in the system are not likely to listen to warnings from men like Trump and Gundlach.

So now it is just a waiting game.

However, the paradigm that has determined EU affairs over the past decades subsists. The lines behind this soul-searching can be drawn along five main emerging currents, and the arguments underpinning each are being sharpened and defined ahead of a September gathering of heads of states and EU officials in Bratislava.

First and second are the two currents that intend to use the Brexit momentum to push for more integration, either using the EU in its current form, or through a re-shaping of the bloc.

Third, the conservative call for more sovereignty, which is leaning towards the fourth eurosceptic option with claims for the end of the EU.

And finally, the cautious, wait-and-see approach of German Chancellor and EU powerbroker, Angela Merkel.

While their claim is legally sound and verifiable, it faces significant political hurdles. One of the suit’s beneficiaries, who claims descent from the Davidic Dynasty, is ready for the legal battle but cautiously pragmatic.

This story has simple beginnings. In 2004, Dr Boruch Fishman, then a recent immigrant to Israel from America, went to tour the tomb of Samuel the prophet north of Jerusalem, which led to a chance meeting with Israel Aurbach, the owner of a nearby farm. Inspired by the Biblical roots of the setting, they began to discuss the link between the House of David and the Temple Mount. They noted that King David purchased the site, originally for a simple altar.

“So David bought the threshing-floor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver. And David built there an altar unto Hashem, and offered burnt-offerings and peace-offerings.” II Samuel 24:24-25

The pair concluded that since the site was originally the property of King David, and no one else has legally purchased it in the interim, the Temple Mount should have been passed along as an inheritance to his male descendants.

Crimea’s historical status is a complicated one. A long-standing part of Russia, it was moved into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. When the Soviet Union split, Crimea remained under Ukrainian control, though it also hosted a major Russian naval base. Ukraine’s 2014 ouster of its Russian-allied government in favor of a western-backed government restarted questions.

With a large ethnic Russian population in Crimea, the peninsula held a vote to secede from Ukraine almost immediately thereafter, and gained accession into the Russian Federation. The US has ruled out ever recognizing that, however, insisting Crimea will forever be Ukrainian territory.

Trump suggested he might have a different position on the matter, however, saying that he was willing to “take a look at” recognizing Crimea as Russian, saying that he believes many Crimeans would rather be in Russia than in Ukraine.

Every institution in America is sold out, corrupted and politically rigged to favor Big Government and Big Business. “America is a lost country,” explains Paul Craig Roberts. “The total corruption of every public and private institution is complete. Nothing remains but tyranny. And lies. Endless lies.”

CNN, Reuters and the Associated Press are all now shameless promoters of every big lie across every sector of society, from vaccines and GMOs to elections and politics. The federal government itself is incapable of doing anything other than lying, and it has totally corrupted the entire realm of science by pulling the strings of funding via the National Institutes of Health and the NSF.

The FDA is entirely corrupt, as is the USDA. Both function now as little more than marketing propaganda pushers for Big Pharma and Big Biotech. Similarly, Google, Facebook and Twitter are all rigged, too, censoring the voices they don’t want anyone to hear while highlighting the establishment lies they wish to promote.

Just last week, Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, and Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, have teamed up together and requested for the White House to review their ban on military gear for police.

The ban, enacted via Mr Obama’s Executive Order back in May 2015, initially banned police forces from attaining riot gear, armored vehicles, and other military-grade equipment from the US Armed Forces — and also banned the federal government from no longer transferring such equipment from the Military to local law enforcement and police officers.

However, upon the White House’s decision to review the ban, this could mean some serious militarization of the police force in the US. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report documenting such militarization of police — along with Amnesty USA, and many other organizations. All coming to the conclusion that militarization of police only triggers more problems, especially in urbanized cities and communities.

Not to mention the 1033 Program and the National Defense Resource Preparedness Executive Order — in preparation for the upcoming police-state, more steps towards martial law, and more draconian plans and laws in place for staged, planned, and funded civil unrest nationwide.

“This comes as close as I have ever seen to cooking the results,” said the legendary pollster and political consultant. “I suppose you can get away with it in polling because there are no laws. But, if this was accounting, they would put them in jail.”

The decision comes on the heels of a Breitbart News report that shows a 17-point swing towards Republican presidential nominee Donald J Trump and away from Democratic nominee Hillary R Clinton. They are going to steal this election

The fifteenth issue of the magazine, titled “Break the Cross,” is dedicated to convincing Christians that Jesus was a prophet of Allah, was never crucified, and that most of the New Testament is a perversion of Jesus’ story orchestrated by St Paul, a “criminal” and “treacherous Jew” who gave up massacring Christians in order to subvert the religion from the inside. Its articles strive to depict Christianity as a pagan religion based on a false Jesus, arguing that the only true Jesus is the prophet of Islam.

The feigned compassion towards Christians in most of the volume stands in stark contrast to the actions of the Islamic State’s terrorists towards Christian communities, which includes rape, torture, crucifixion, and slavery.

In the issue’s Foreword, the editors make clear the intent of the magazine: the issue will help “Crusaders read into why Muslims hate and fight them, why pagan Christians should break their crosses, why liberalist secularists should return to the fitrah (natural human disposition), and why sceptical atheists should recognize their Creator and submit to Him.”

“In essence, we explain why they must abandon their infidelity and accept Islam, the religion of sincerity and submission to the Lord of the heavens and the earth,” the editors write. As for St Paul, he is referred to in turn as a “criminal” and “treacherous Jew” who “intentionally sought to deviate the monotheistic Nazarenes in order to tarnish Jesus’ name – even if it meant Paul’s own persecution.” The Holy Trinity being an essential concept of St Paul’s writings is a form of polytheism, according to Islamic State jihadists, one intended to deceive Christians.

Of Europe’s 27 commissioners, only four voted in favor of applying the fines; the other 23 voted against. According to El País, the deciding factor in the decision was an impromptu phone call from German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble to some of the more conservative commissioners, giving them the green light to forego the fine.

The U-turn offers Spanish and Portuguese taxpayers a brief but welcome respite from Troika-enforced fauxterity. As we previously pointed out, if the Commission had imposed the fine, it would not have been paid by the politicians who failed to play by the rules agreed upon in Brussels; it would have been paid by the citizenry who are already suffering the consequences of the recession that helped cause the deficits. But does this rare act of benevolence from Germany represent a genuine shift in policy toward the Eurozone’s Club Med members or is it merely an act of political expedience?

Naturally, Schäuble and Juncker would much prefer Mariano Rajoy, a man cut from pretty much the same ideological cloth as themselves, to stay in power. Spain has been an important ally of Germany under Rajoy’s charge and the support of his party was essential in propelling Juncker into the European Commission’s top spot. What’s more, if Rajoy does eventually form a government, a new round of pre-ordained fauxterity will quickly kick in.

But there are also signs that Germany may be beginning to marginally soften its stance on austerity, prompting rating agency Fitch to lament Europe’s abandonment, once again, of fiscal discipline and economic reforms. Merkel’s government seems to have realized that for the European project to have any kind of future in a post-Brexit world, it will have to offer a little more carrot and a little less stick. If it doesn’t, the single currency that enables German manufacturers to export at a discount rate all over the world will eventually crumble under the weight of its own contradictions.

“The problem is this,” warns US rating agency Standard & Poor, “The EU, as it is currently constructed and operates, doesn’t embody a coherent ‘pooling’ of the various dimensions of nation-state sovereignty, and therefore it’s unsustainable in its current form.”

This was confirmed yesterday when Turkey announced it would not fulfill its part of the refugee deal with the EU if the bloc does not lift its visa requirements for Turkish citizens by October, Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, told a German daily.

Turkey’s fulfillment of its commitments under the refugee deal with the EU “depends on the lifting of visa requirements for our citizens that is also a subject of the agreement,” Cavusoglu said during an exclusive interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The minister also stressed that the Turkish government is waiting for a “specific deadline” to be set for the lifting of visa requirements. “It can be early or mid-October but we wait for an exact date,” he said.

Diplomatically, Cavusoglu emphasized that his words are “not a threat,” but added that “if there is no visa abolition, we will be forced to abandon the agreement struck on March 18 concerning taking back [refugees].” So yes, it was a threat, if only one which reacts to Europe's realization that it had made a bargain with the devil, and was trying to pull out however while hoping Turkey would keep its end of the bargain. Turkey, however, has refused, and now the 2 month countdown to October and another refugee flood may have begun.

In a newspaper interview Prime Minister Valls says the Republic has been forced to intervene to drive out the "poison" of radical Islamism. And he has announced plans to shut down mosques supporting Salafism, an ultra-orthodox religious-political ideology based on a belief in "physical" jihadism practised by some followers of the Sunni faith. He said: "All Salafists are not jihadists ... but almost all are jihadist Salafists..." A terrible poison has spread.

"Slowly, insidiously, on a background of influences from abroad and rising communalism, developed against a model of society, a model against the Republic and its values. Many Muslims in France are taken hostage by the fundamentalist Salafism, who worship a weapon against others. The places of worship that house preachers will be closed systematically".

Amid the cacophony of police sirens, low-flying helicopters and rifle fire, there was another sound during the attempt to overthrow president Recep Tayyip Erdogan: The wailing of Turkey’s imams. From the nations’s 85,000 mosques, their amplified voices were heard calling upon the faithful to take to the streets and defy the plotters. The people listened.

For others the night presented different opportunities as hardline Muslim Sunnis, whipped up to a frenzy, targeted Turkey’s Christian community. In Matalya, a sprawling city in Anatolia, once the heartland of Christianity in the East, they targeted a Protestant church. Nor was Matalya alone. In the Black Sea city of Trabzon others attacked the Santa Maria church, smashing windows and using hammers to break down its door.

Turkey, which once boasted two million Christians, has barely 120,000 now, fewer even than Iran. But what shocked people most about July 15’s attacks was how much hatred still remains after almost 10 years. Though it is nominally a secular republic there can be little doubt that the government and Turkey’s 117,000 Sunni imams work together.

Since the night of the failed coup, imams have been chanting the Selah prayer, usually reserved to announce a death, on a daily basis as a rally call. “The reality is that Turkey is neither a democracy nor a secular republic,” said Yuce Kabakci, a pastor in Istanbul. “There is no division between government affairs and religious affairs.”