Berkshire sold roughly 19 million shares of Johnson & Johnson, and reduced his overall stake in “consumer product stocks” by 21%. Berkshire Hathaway also sold its entire stake in California-based computer parts supplier Intel. With 70% of the US economy dependent on consumer spending, Buffett’s apparent lack of faith in these companies’ future prospects is worrisome.

Unfortunately Buffett isn’t alone. Fellow billionaire John Paulson, who made a fortune betting on the subprime mortgage meltdown, is clearing out of US stocks too. Finally, billionaire George Soros recently sold nearly all of his bank stocks, including shares of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs. Between the three banks, Soros sold more than a million shares.

So why are these billionaires dumping their shares of US companies? It’s very likely that these professional investors are aware of specific research that points toward a massive market correction, as much as 90%. One such person publishing this research is Robert Wiedemer, an esteemed economist and author of the New York Times best-selling book 'Aftershock'.

Before you dismiss the possibility of a 90% drop in the stock market as unrealistic, consider Wiedemer’s credentials. In 2006, Wiedemer and a team of economists accurately predicted the collapse of the US housing market, equity markets, and consumer spending that almost sank the United States. Wiedemer calmly laid out a clear explanation of why a large drop of some sort is a virtual certainty. It starts with the reckless strategy of the Federal Reserve to print a massive amount of money out of thin air in an attempt to stimulate the economy.

“These funds haven’t made it into the markets and the economy yet. But it is a mathematical certainty that once the dam breaks, and this money passes through the reserves and hits the markets, inflation will surge,” said Wiedemer. “Once you hit 10% inflation, 10-year Treasury bonds lose about half their value. And by 20%, any value is all but gone. Interest rates will increase dramatically at this point, and that will cause real estate values to collapse. And the stock market will collapse as a consequence of these other problems.”

The army's clampdown on supporters of deposed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi over the past week, the "suspicious deaths" of 37 prisoners in custody and the detention of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie on Tuesday have worsened relations between Washington and Egypt's new rulers.

The White House, State Department and Pentagon all disputed a statement by a US senator's office that the US government had decided for now to stop funding to Egypt's military. Obama and his aides have been trying to navigate a tricky path on Egypt, expressing displeasure with the army's actions while not entirely breaking a relationship crucial to US security interests in the Middle East.

Cutting off the aid could be costly for the US government. One former senior US government official said the United States could face a bill of about $3 billion if it cancels military aid to Egypt since it is one of two countries, along with Israel, able to order equipment before US funds to pay for them have been approved by Congress. A current US official said some of the costs would flow from penalties for cancelling the contracts as well as the expenses of winding down such programs.

They are important "partners" even beyond the Iraqi context. Berlin has been intensifying its contacts to the Kurdish autonomous government in Erbil since 2005 and more intensively since 2008. At that time, the focus was primarily on obtaining access to Northern Iraqi natural gas, to supply the planned "Nabucco" pipeline.

However following that project's collapse, German influence has focused on the regional reorganization of the nations. Foreign policy experts are currently discussing a tighter affiliation of the Kurdish-speaking regions in Northern Iraq, Syria and Turkey, with the possible perspective of forming a sort of "Kurdistan Province" integrated in a federally restructured Turkey. A "Kurdish National Conference" - due to be convened soon in Erbil to unite Kurdish associations from Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran - will probably also focus on these plans. If such reorganization does take place, Berlin would not like to be watching from the sidelines.

So now Congress, who promised the American people a fair health care plan that would last generations, now can add themselves to the nation of Islam, which under the provisions of Obamacare, is exempt from its requirements and taxes.

As a consequence of this provision, Muslims may claim a religious exemption that is denied Christians and Jews. Since Islam believes insurance is haraam (forbidden) and likens insurance to gambling, the religion is excluded from requirements, mandates, or penalties set forth in the bill. Others who fall into this category are the Amish, American Indians, and Christian Scientists. Although the US Constitution grants all Americans equal protection of the law, some Americans are more equal than others.

They have been incredibly reckless, and as James Rickards told Greg Hunter during an interview the other day, we are in much worse shape to deal with a major banking crisis than we were back in 2008...

What’s going to cause the next crisis?

Rickards says, “The problem in 2008 was too-big-to-fail banks. Well, those banks are now bigger. Their derivative books are bigger. In other words, everything that was wrong in 2008 is worse today.” Rickards goes on to warn, “The last time, in 2008 when the crisis started, the Fed’s balance sheet was $800 billion. Today, the Fed’s balance sheet is $3.3 trillion and increasing at $1 trillion a year.”

Rickards contends, “You’re going to have a banking crisis worse than the last one because the banking system is bigger without the resources because the Fed is tapped out.” As far as the Fed ending the money printing, Rickards predicts, “My view is they won’t. The economy is fundamentally weak. We have 50 million on food stamps, 24 million unemployed and 11 million on disability, and all these numbers are going up.”

We never even came close to recovering from the last financial crisis and the last recession. Now the next major wave of the economic collapse is coming up quickly. I hope that you are taking this time to prepare for the approaching storm, because it is going to be very painful.

The much anticipated "financial correction" is rapidly approaching, and investors are starting to race for the exits. We have not seen so many financial trouble signs all come together at one time like this since just prior to the last major financial crisis. It is almost as if a "perfect storm" is brewing, and a lot of the "smart money" has already gotten out of stocks and bonds.

Could it be possible that we are heading toward another nightmarish financial crisis? Could we see a repeat of 2008 or potentially even something worse? Of course a lot of people believe that we will never see another major financial crisis like we experienced in 2008 ever again.

A lot of people think that this type of "doom and gloom" talk is foolish. It is those kinds of people that did not see the last financial crash coming and that are choosing not to prepare for the next one even though the warning signs are exceedingly clear. Let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst and right now things do not look good at all.

The extremist group could plant explosives on trains and tunnels or sabotage tracks and electrical cabling, said Bild, Europe's most widely read daily. Bild said the information came from the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, which had listened in to a conference call involving top Al-Qaeda operatives. The attacks on Europe's rail network was a "central topic" of this call, Bild said.

Authorities in Germany have responded to the threat with discrete measures such as deploying plain-clothed police officers at key stations and on main routes, according to the daily. According to US media reports, intelligence services intercepted a conference call earlier this month between Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and more than 20 operatives from across the group's global network.

Iran and Hezbollah, it warned, were continuing their “global terror campaign” against Israeli and Jewish targets. It noted that Iran remained bent on avenging alleged Israeli responsibility for the killing of Hezbollah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh in a Damascus car-bombing in 2008, and the deaths of three Iranian nuclear scientists.

It said its information indicated that Israeli businessmen and ex-government officials were prime potential targets for assassination and/or kidnapping. With all that in mind, the bureau reconfirmed that Israelis are barred altogether from travel to Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, where the “concrete” terror threat was “very high.” Generally, it urged Israelis traveling worldwide to take extra precautions, such as avoiding unexpected meetings or out of the way places, and to change regular travel routes.

There is a curious and bizarre reversal of the natural at Fukushima: a looking-glass world inversion. Unlike the standard marine catastrophe, for example the Titanic, where the need is to manically pump water out of the ship to stop it sinking, at Fukushima the game is to madly pump water in, in order to stop it melting down and exploding.

Probably because it is now clear that the saturation of the ground from all the pumping water for cooling the several reactors and spent fuel pools has destabilized the foundations of the buildings, TEPCO is bringing forward its operation to try and deal with what is perhaps the most dangerous of the four sites, the spent fuel pond of Reactor 4. For this pond contains a truly enormous amount of radioactive material: 1,331 spent fuel grids amounting to 228.3 tons of Uranium and Plutonium buried inside a swimming pool which has already dried out once and exploded.

That explosion blasted a significant, but unknown, quantity of lethally radioactive bits and pieces of fuel element around the site (where I heard they were bulldozed into the ground - who knows?), but it also blew the top off the building, covered the fuel elements under the water with rubble and pieces of crane machinery, and no doubt twisted and melted a large proportion of the remaining spent fuel.

Of course, to make the game more interesting, they are not just sitting there like they were when the tank was being used. They are under water (sea water), covered in debris, corroded, busted, twisted, intertwined and generally impossible to deal with. And here is the really scary thing: if you manage to bust a fuel element, the best outcome is that huge amounts of radioactivity escape into the air and blow over Japan, just like before. The worst outcome is when two of these things get too close, perhaps because in pulling one out it breaks and falls against another one in the tank. Because then you suddenly have lots of fission, a lot of heat, a meltdown, possibly a big blast like before, and the destruction of the entire cooling pond. Or else the water boils off and the whole thing catches fire.

Then what happens? Not quite Armageddon, but as far as Japan is concerned, almost. I bet they have contingency plans to evacuate the northern island to Korea, China, anywhere. A lot of this radiation will end up in the USA, a long way downwind, admittedly, but then there is an awful lot of radioactivity involved.

As more evidence emerges from this ghastly inadvertent Fukushima experiment, we will see more and more that we have governments and radiation agencies who are wielding unsafe and incorrect scientific assessments of reality. Additionally, we have what might become one of the most serious global public health events of human history being overseen by a private profit-making company, TEPCO, with no good track record of competence or believability. And appropriately, in this looking-glass world, in a bizarre echo of these two inversions of justice and democracy, we have a sinking ship that can only be saved by pumping water into it.

A spokesman for the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said on Tuesday that 300 tons of highly radioactive water has leaked from a stainless steel tank on the territory of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority has classified the leak as a Level One incident, the second lowest on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) for radiological releases, a spokesman informed Reuters.

The incident is the first Level One since the actual catastrophe at Fukushima in March 2011 when Japanese authorities issued an INES rating. Level One means that the incident is classified as anomalous situation that exceeds limits of safe functioning of an installation. The most dangerous, Level Seven, has only been applied twice: for the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986 and the meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima plant itself.

TEPCO has to keep the melted uranium fuel rods of three destroyed reactors awash with water using a jerry-rigged system only to keep the melted debris cool and relatively stable. To establish a closed cycle of the process, the operator stores huge amounts of radioactive water at Fukushima nuclear facility.

It is believed that overall there are more than 350,000 tons of radioactive water stored at the Fukushima plant in special tanks and the drainage system, and without special protection in the basements of the devastated facility. At the beginning of 2013, TEPCO drained most of the basement galleries, pumping radioactive water into newly delivered tanks.

RT was one of the few to report that the Egyptian military’s removal by force of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi and his entire government was undertaken with the firm, secret backing of Saudi Arabia and several Gulf oil states, directly in defiance of Washington’s agenda. Now Saudi King Abdullah has confirmed this in an open declaration of support for Egypt’s military action against what the King called “terrorists.”

It is the most open declaration to date that there is a huge and deepening rift between Washington and the Saudis of a scale perhaps unprecedented since the 1945 agreements between US President Roosevelt and then King Ibn Saud. In his official August 16 statement, King Abdullah declared, “The people and government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia stood and still stand today with our brothers in Egypt against terrorism, extremism and sedition, and against whoever is trying to interfere in Egypt's internal affairs…” So much for Obama’s call for “dialogue” between the army and the Brotherhood.

The Saudi support for Army head and Defense Minister General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi was immediately backed by Jordan and the Emirates. It came after several days of violent protests by Muslim Brotherhood supporters in several Egyptian cities, which resulted in hundreds of deaths in clashes between the military and Brotherhood backers demanding Morsi’s return. NATO governments, led by Washington, have at the same time have tried to increase pressure on the provisional government to reinstate Morsi and the “democratically elected” government.

The EU is hardly eager to inflame Saudi leaders into another oil embargo, as was done in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. Now the open backing by Saudi King Abdullah for the military crackdown creates an entirely new dimension to the crisis.

The US government has decided privately to act as if the military takeover of Egypt was a coup, temporarily suspending most forms of military aid, despite deciding not to announce publicly a coup determination one way or the other, according to a leading US senator.

In the latest example of its poorly understood Egypt policy, the Obama administration has decided to temporarily suspend the disbursement of most direct military aid, the delivery of weapons to the Egyptian military, and some forms of economic aid to the Egyptian government while it conducts a broad review of the relationship. The administration won’t publicly acknowledge all aspects of the aid suspension and maintains its rhetorical line that no official coup determination has been made, but behind the scenes, extensive measures to treat the military takeover of Egypt last month as a coup are being implemented on a temporary basis.

The office of Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat for Vermont), the head of the Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, told The Daily Beast on Monday that military aid to Egypt has been temporarily cut off. “[His] understanding is that aid to the Egyptian military has been halted, as required by law,” said David Carle, a spokesman for Leahy.

Europe's main stock markets opened down 1 percent following a fourth straight day of falls on both Wall Street and in Asia to leave MSCI's global index .MIWD00000PUS, which tracks shares in 45 countries, at its lowest level since July 12. Wednesday's minutes from the most recent Fed meeting could offer fresh hints on when the US central bank will start winding down its $85 billion-a-month support program, a tricky process markets have been nervous about for months.

The uncertainty has broadly driven up bond market borrowing costs in recent weeks. The upward pressure on US government bonds eased overnight, leaving the benchmark 10-year Treasury just off a 2-year high at 2.83 percent.

Ramin Nakisa, a global macro strategist for UBS in London, said market turbulence was bound to pick up as the Fed starts to switch the direction of its policy. "We expect volatility... people will start to wonder whether there is anything in the fixed-income world that really is safe," he said adding that there was also likely to be another short selloff in share markets.

The army and emergency workers have set up 166 temporary shelters across three regions, providing drinking water, hot food and medical supplies, RIA Novosti news agency reports. But Russian Vesti TV reports that many people do not want to be evacuated. The Amur and Khabarovsk regions, near the Chinese border, are worst affected.

Experts suggest the flooding will not get any worse over the next few days, but the weather forecast promises more rain later this month, says BBC Russian's Yuri Maloveryan in Blagoveshchensk. But the flood waters are not expected to fully recede until September, our correspondent adds. The deluge has also caused widespread flooding in neighbouring provinces of China, prompting mass evacuations.

"Eighty percent, if not 90%, of the people have no knowledge of economics whatsoever," said Mr Lucke, a professor of economics and head of upstart political party Alternative for Germany. "The situation is very dangerous for Germany and the European Union."

Such unvarnished talk has become a hallmark for the party, known as the AfD, which was founded early this year and is making waves as it stands for its first national election in September. The party is adding a wrinkle to Chancellor Angela Merkel's election plans by agitating for something virtually no mainstream politician has dared suggest: breaking up the euro zone by forcing financially troubled Southern European countries out.

"It would be best if the entire 'Club Med' left the euro," Mr Lucke told supporters during a recent rally.