Early Headines: US Credit Invisibles, US Great Plains Flooding, Silk Road to South America and More

Early Bird Headlines 25 May 2015

Econintersect: Here are some of the headlines we found to help you start your day. For more headlines see our afternoon feature for GEI members, What We Read Today, which has many more headlines and a number of article discussions to keep you abreast of what we have found interesting.

U.S.

• Funds denied: 1 in 5 Americans underbanked or ‘credit invisible’ (Al Jazeera) Some 68 million American households struggle to access checking accounts and reliable financial services. Individuals in these categories are disproportionately low-income, African-American and young. See GEI News.
• Texas and Oklahoma: 3 dead after record rains unleash dangerous flooding (CNN) Hat tip to Alun Hill. Flooding from record-setting rains in Texas and Oklahoma swept away hundreds of homes and left at least three people dead. See next article.
• The Texas drought ends; climate alarmists wrong again! (Fabius Maximus) FM contributes to GEI. Animated map shows how drought has disappeared from the Lone Star state over the past 3 1/2 years.
• Is Puerto Rico America’s Greece? (Bloomberg) There is no similarity.

Greece

• Greece Is Playing a Huge Game of Chicken: Von Pfeil (Bloomberg) Private Capital Investment Strategist Enzio Von Pfeil discusses the Greek debt crisis, European equities and Japan’s economy. This video is highly insulting to Yanis Varoufakis. See GEI News: Varoufakis Tells the Truth about Riga.
  
• Why a Greek default would be disastrous for Greece and the rest of the world (Arabian Money) Christopher Pissarides, Regius professor of economics at the London School of Economics, says that a Greek default would be ‘disastrous’.

Iraq

• Iraq will take back Ramadi from IS ‘in days’ – PM Abadi (BBC News) Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi has said that the city of Ramadi could be taken back from Islamic State militants “in days”. But he told the BBC that more support was needed from international coalition partners.

China

• The Silk Road Stretches To South America (Oriental Review) China’s grand strategy is to facilitate global trade via strategically constructed infrastructure projects, believing that the economic freedom this provides to its partners can liberate them from Western unipolar frameworks and more easily transition them into the emerging multipolar system.
• China’s Central Bank Lowers Borrowing Costs to Help Clean Up Local Debt Mess (Bloomberg) The three-month Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate has tumbled 200 basis points since March 31, heading for the biggest two-month drop since 2008. That coincides with the government kicking off a municipal bond program and the exchange of regional loans into lower-yielding notes. China’s government needed lower borrowing costs to clean up a local debt mess. The central bank obliged.
• China Retakes Top Spot as the Biggest Foreign Owner of U.S. Debt (Wall Street Journal)

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