In fact, anyone that has ever had a tremendous amount of credit card debt knows how painful that day of reckoning can be. To mindlessly run up credit card debt is exceedingly reckless, but unfortunately that is precisely what we have been doing as a nation as a whole. We are a “buy now, pay later” society, and our national day of reckoning is approaching very, very quickly. Often we like to focus on our exploding national debt, but household debt is out of control too. In fact, the total amount of household debt in the United States is now up to a whopping 12.3 trillion dollars…

In this article I haven’t even talked about corporate debt yet. Instead of learning their lessons from the last financial crisis, big corporations have gone on the biggest debt spree of all time. If you can believe it, corporate debt has approximately doubled since the last financial crisis. In other words, since the last recession we have essentially matched the total amount of corporate debt that we accumulated from the beginning of the country up to 2009.

Unfortunately, a lot of that debt is now going bad. We are a bunch of debt pigs, and we just can’t help ourselves. We have come to believe that it is “normal” to go into so much debt, and as a society we continue to race toward economic oblivion.

When President Jean-Claude Juncker makes his annual State of the Union address to Parliament in Strasbourg on September 14, he might easily repeat last year's warning: the EU had a "last chance" to save itself from a tide of centrifugal nationalisms.

Last week, the EU's remaining Big Three - German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and their host, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi - felt they needed to renew their vows at the wellspring of the union, the island of Ventotene, where in 1941 prisoners of Mussolini wrote a manifesto for a united Europe.

That they met on the deck of the aircraft carrier Garibaldi reinforced the sense of beleaguered leaders rallying to the EU's defense as they contemplated an obstacle-strewn political calendar for the year ahead. The EU leaders are first preparing for a summit on September 16 in Bratislava - without Britain - that aims to sketch out a post-Brexit future for the Union.

On October 2, Hungary's right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, is set to deliver another slap to Brussels: a largely symbolic referendum to reject an EU quota system for relocating refugees among member states - a scheme Juncker invested much capital in a year ago, but which has barely got off the ground.

Mired in a world of low growth, low inflation and low interest rates, officials from the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank said their efforts to bolster the economy through monetary policy may falter unless elected leaders stepped forward with bold measures. These would range from immigration reform in Japan to structural changes to boost productivity and growth in the US and Europe.

Without that, they said, it would be hard to convince markets and households that things will get better, and encourage the shift in mood many economists feel are needed to improve economic performance worldwide. During a Saturday session at the symposium, such a slump in expectations about inflation and about other aspects of the economy was cited as a central problem complicating central banks' efforts to reach inflation targets and dimming prospects in Japan and Europe.

The New York Post reports:

Team Obama’s new low in the name of ‘trans rights’.

One of the top guardians of American freedoms just entered the fight against the Obama administration’s insane excesses in the name of “trans rights.” The Department of Health and Human Services recently issued rules telling doctors they can’t decline to perform gender-reassignment surgery on kids if it’s recommended by a “mental health professional.” Refusal could be a career-ender.

How crazy is the rule? Well, for starters, most trans teens identify differently later in life — yet reassignment surgery is often irreversible, and even less-radical procedures can be harmful, as HHS’ own medical experts note.

Not to mention that the Hippocratic Oath (and basic human conscience) enjoins doctors from doing procedures they believe harmful to their patients. On top of that, the rule also orders private insurers and employers to cover the procedures — even though Medicare and Medicaid, which HHS oversees, don’t.

The UN Security Council has started considering issuing a statement to condemn North Korea’s SLBM test launch toward the Sea of Japan. It is vital for the UNSC to swiftly send a strong message to North Korea, which has repeatedly conducted nuclear tests and ballistic missile launches in violation of UN sanctions resolutions.

The regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un opposes the planned deployment of the United States’ state-of-the-art Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system in South Korea. The SLBM launch, which was conducted during a US-South Korean joint military exercise, was apparently intended to shake Japan, the United States and South Korea by demonstrating North Korea’s ability to carry out a surprise attack.

Kim, chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea, watched the test-firing and declared that the SLBM launch proved his country “joined the front rank of military powers fully equipped with nuclear attack capabilities,” according to the Korean Central News Agency. He also ordered increased efforts to develop nuclear weapons and ways to deliver them, the KCNA reported.

If North Korea successfully deploys an SLBM equipped with a miniaturized nuclear warhead for combat use, it would allow the country to conduct nuclear attacks in various different ways. This is a source of grave concern that could undermine regional stability.

Police said 15 people were briefly detained over the protest and are likely to face charges of trespassing, harassment and breaching laws on public assembly. Berlin police spokeswoman Patricia Braemer said the protesters belonged to the Identitarian Movement. Germany's domestic intelligence agency said this month it was putting the far-right group under observation because it aims to subvert democracy.

Leaflets scattered by the group claimed the government is trying to replace Germany's population with Muslim immigrants. Germany has seen an unprecedented influx of asylum-seekers, many from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, over the past year.

We were handcrafted from the soil, so what grows in the soil is what feeds us and all living creatures. Unfortunately, since the days of nuclear testing, the soil’s life-giving properties have been devastated by GMOs, pesticides, pollution, plastics, depleted uranium, pharmaceuticals and all those toxic ingredients dumped into the water circulating our earth. Clean, organic robust food from good soil is MORE than food — it’s medicine. Folks in New York City know this, and doctors are prescribing good food for their patients.

Mike Adams, the Health Ranger reports, “Dubbed the ‘Fruit and Vegetables Prescription Program,’ it allows doctors to ‘prescribe’ fresh fruit and vegetables to overweight or obese patients by giving them ‘Health Bucks’ that are redeemable at local farmer’s markets…

“This program makes New York City the largest US city to officially acknowledge that fruits and vegetables have a role to play in preventing chronic degenerative disease — an idea that the FDA insists is delusional. According to the FDA, there is no such thing as any fruit, vegetable, supplement or superfood that has any ability whatsoever to prevent, treat or cure any disease.

“…according to the FDA, the mere ‘prescribing’ of a food as something to prevent obesity automatically transforms that food into a ‘drug.’ Under current FDA regulations, then, NYC is guilty of promoting ‘unapproved drugs’ which are really just fruits and vegetables. But that’s how FDA logic works.”

Blockchain technology provided an elegant solution. Instead of passing funds through the US banking system’s costly and inefficient network of correspondent accounts, Blockchain technology provides an easy way for banks to send payments directly to one another. I cannot understate how important this technology is. Blockchain may very well be what neutralizes the US government’s domination of the global financial system. And while there’s been a lot of momentum in this direction even I’m surprised at how fast it’s moving.

Today, four of the world’s largest banks announced a brand new joint venture to create a new financial settlement protocol built on Blockchain technology. Deutsche Bank from Germany, UBS from Switzerland, Santander from Spain, and Bank of New York Mellon have joined together to launch what they’re naming the very un-sexy “utility settlement coin”. Like Ripple, Setl, Monetas, and several other competing technologies, Utility Settlement Coin has the potential to end the reliance on the US banking system for cross-border payments and financial transactions.

Banks will be able to send payments to one another directly without having to transit through the Wall Street financial toll plaza. (Global consulting firm Oliver Wyman estimates the cost of clearing and settling international financial transactions at up to $80 billion annually.) This has enormous implications, especially for US banks. The Federal Reserve, for example, has already warned that financial technology could pose stability risks to the US financial system. And they’re right.

If foreign banks are able to transact directly with one another without having to go through the US banking system, then why would they need to park trillions of dollars in the United States? They wouldn’t. Adoption of this technology could cause a gigantic vacuum of deposits out of the US banking system. US banks would take a big hit. And the US government would have far fewer foreign buyers to sell its ever-expanding piles of debt.

Make no mistake, the adoption of this technology is a game-changing development with far-reaching implications. And it’s happening very quickly. If these mega-banks can hit their milestones, they’ll launch commercially in eighteen months. Mark it on your calendar – that may be the end of peak US financial dominance.

Unlike festering frictions over trade, the new front is in an area - investment - where the global rules of engagement are more amorphous and where national security interests are more prominent. That raises the risk of a rapid escalation of tensions that can’t be so easily contained.

“The implicit accusation when rejecting overseas direct investment is much stronger than trade,” said James Laurenceson, deputy director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology in Sydney. Using a national-security rationale to blocking outbound investment by China “is far more confronting. It suggests that China is untrustworthy and has potentially nefarious intentions. That’s what Beijing objects to.”

But it’s not just security concerns that are driving the increased backlash against stepped-up Chinese investment abroad, especially by state-owned companies. It’s also the suspicion that the Communist-led government is trying to game the system by snapping up foreign firms in key areas of the economy while blocking others from doing the same in China.