Race/Topic (Click to Sort)	Poll	Results	Spread
President Obama Job Approval	Gallup	Approve 45, Disapprove 51	Disapprove +6
President Obama Job Approval	Rasmussen Reports	Approve 45, Disapprove 54	Disapprove +9
Direction of Country	Rasmussen Reports	Right Direction 27, Wrong Track 66	Wrong Track +39

Friday, August 21

2016 Republican Presidential Nomination

National: GOP, Dem | Iowa: GOP, Dem | New Hampshire: GOP, Dem | South Carolina: GOP, Dem | General Election Match-Ups

Polling Data

Poll	Date	Trump	Bush	Carson	Walker	Rubio	Cruz	Fiorina	Paul	Kasich	Huckabee	Christie	Perry	Santorum	Jindal	Graham	Spread
RCP Average	8/9 – 8/16	22.0	10.7	9.7	7.7	7.3	7.3	6.3	4.3	4.3	4.3	3.3	1.3	1.0	0.7	0.3	Trump +11.3
CNN/ORC	8/13 – 8/16	24	13	9	8	8	5	5	6	5	4	3	2	1	0	0	Trump +11
FOX News	8/11 – 8/13	25	9	12	6	4	10	5	3	4	6	3	1	1	1	0	Trump +13
Rasmussen	8/9 – 8/10	17	10	8	9	10	7	9	4	4	3	4	1	1	1	1	Trump +7

All 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination Polling Data

Peter Schiff Economic Collapse Headed for U S in 2015

Will Wall Street’s rough week prove an overdue correction?

Keiser Report: $32 trillion in pointless trading (E799)

Gordon Chang on the China Problem

Gordon Chang – A Lot Of People Are Losing Substantial Amounts In China – 20 Aug 15 | Gazunda

Keiser Report: Planet Ponzi dwarfing world’s economy (E795)

Keiser Report: China Mainland MSM Myths (E704)

Is China’s Economy On The Verge Of Collapse?

Alex Jones & Max Keiser – American Economic Crisis! Dollar Collapse Imminent!

Why China is Panicking About the Stock Market Crash | China Uncensored

China Reality Check: Has the Hard Landing in China Already Started?

China’s economic growth rate fell to 7.4% in 2014, and many believe the official figure is actually more generous than the reality. Most forecasts expect growth to come in well under 7.0% in 2015. What are we to make of these trends? Are we at the beginning of a hard landing where the long history of structural inefficiencies are finally and inescapably being revealed and the possibilities of a financial crisis more ever looming? Or are we in a gradual shift toward a “new normal” of healthier and still relatively robust growth as a result of foresighted policy adjustments? Or is something else going on altogether? Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder of J Capital Research, is a veteran analyst of the China’s economy and economic policy process. She travels widely in China in order to compare official data with actual behavior and performance. Bob Davis of the Wall Street Journal is a leading expert on macroeconomic policy and recently completed an extended posting in Beijing, where he wrote regularly about China’s economy.

Why 99% of trading is pointless

Published: Aug 1, 2015

An astonishing $32 trillion in securities changes hands every year with no net positive impact for investors, charges Vanguard Group Founder John Bogle.

Meanwhile, corporate finance — the reason Wall Street exists — is just a tiny slice of the total business. The nation’s big investment banks probably could work for less than a week and take the rest of the year off with no real effect on the economy.

“The job of finance is to provide capital to companies. We do it to the tune of $250 billion a year in IPOs and secondary offerings,” Bogle told Time in an interview.
“What else do we do? We encourage investors to trade about $32 trillion a year. So the way I calculate it, 99% of what we do in this industry is people trading with one another, with a gain only to the middleman. It’s a waste of resources.”

Rent seekers

It’s a lot of money, $32 trillion. Nearly double the entire U.S. economy moving from one pocket to another, with a toll-taker in the middle. Most people refer to them as “stock brokers,” but let’s call them what they are — toll-takers and rent-seekers.

Rent-seeking as an occupation is as old as the hills. In exchange for working to build up credentials and relative fluency in the arcane rules of an industry, one gets to stand back from actual work and just collect money.

Ostensibly, the job of a financial adviser is to provide advice. Do you actually get that from your broker? It is worth anything?

Research shows, over and over, that stock brokers can’t do much of anything demonstrably valuable. They don’t know which stocks will go up or down and when. They don’t know which asset classes will outperform this year or next.

Nobody knows. That’s the point. If you’re among that small cadre of extremely high-level traders who can throw loads of cash at a short-term fluke, fantastic. If you have a mind for numbers like Warren Buffett that allows you to buy companies on the cheap and hold them forever, excellent.

If you’re a normal retirement investor trying to get from A to B and retire on time, well, you have a really big problem to face: The toll-taker wants your money.

Dead weight

So he needs you to trade — a lot. Because that’s how stock brokers make money. Not by doling out retirement advice, but by ensuring that your account is active and churning commissions on behalf of them and their employers.

What’s a highway with no traffic on it? If you’re a toll-taker, it’s a money loser. So Wall Street’s rent-seekers need traffic in the form of regular trading. An account that sits invested for months at a time with no trades is dead weight to them.

Nevertheless, as Bogle maintains, doing nothing is the key. “Don’t do something, just stand there!” he has often said.

A portfolio indexing approach to investing codifies Bogle’s time-tested and effective way of investing for retirement — without lining the pockets of toll-taking stock brokers along the way.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-99-of-trading-is-pointless-john-bogle-2015-07-30?link=sfmw_fb

Trump widens lead over U.S. Republican presidential field: Reuters poll

By Emily Stephenson

Republican Donald Trump is pulling away from the pack in the race for the party’s U.S. presidential nomination, widening his lead over his closest rivals in the past week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Friday.

Republican voters show no signs they are growing weary of the brash real estate mogul, who has dominated political headlines and the 17-strong Republican presidential field with his tough talk about immigration and insults directed at his political rivals. The candidates are vying to be nominated to represent their party in the November 2016 general election.

Nearly 32 percent of Republicans surveyed online said they backed Trump, up from 24 percent a week earlier, the opinion poll found. Trump had nearly double the support of his closest competitor, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who got 16 percent. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson was third at 8 percent.

Even when Trump was pitted directly in the poll against just his top two competitors, 44 percent backed him. Bush won about 29 percent of respondents, and Carson 25 percent.

“He’s not taking any guff from anybody,” Dewey Stedman, 70, a Republican from East Wenatchee, Washington, said of the publicity-loving billionaire. “If you don’t have something in your brains, you’re not going to have billions of dollars.”

Trump has driven the debate on the campaign trail with a hard-line immigration plan that calls for the deportation of undocumented immigrants, amendment of the Constitution to end automatic citizenship for all people born in the United States, and construction of a wall along the border with Mexico.

He also has feuded with Bush and other rivals while boasting he could easily beat Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s campaign momentum has paid off with bigger crowds on the campaign trail. On Friday night, he moved a planned rally in Mobile, Alabama, to a football stadium seating more than 40,000.

“It is an appeal to people that are just aggravated about what’s going on,” Republican strategist Rich Galen said, adding that Trump is a “novelty act” that voters will tire of.

Friday’s results in the online rolling opinion poll are based on a survey of 501 Republicans and have a credibility interval of plus or minus 5 percent.

Separate results found Clinton leading among Democrats, though support for her dipped below 50 percent to 48.5 percent.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont came in second in the poll of 625 Democrats, followed by Vice President Joe Biden, who has not entered the race. That survey had a credibility interval of plus or minus 4.5 percent.

http://news.yahoo.com/trump-widens-lead-over-u-republican-presidential-field-224439794.html