If the oil futures market is correct, Saudi Arabia will start running into trouble within two years. It will be in existential crisis by the end of the decade.

The Saudis took a huge gamble last November when they stopped supporting prices and opted instead to flood the market and drive out rivals, boosting their own output to 10.6m barrels a day (b/d) into the teeth of the downturn.

Bank of America says OPEC is now "effectively dissolved". The cartel might as well shut down its offices in Vienna to save money.

If the aim was to choke the US shale industry, the Saudis have misjudged badly, just as they misjudged the growing shale threat at every stage for eight years. This link, by the way, is a delightful read, headlining US oil producers telling OPEC, “Anything you can do we can do better.”

OPEC now faces a permanent headwind. Each rise in price will be capped by a surge in US output. Saudi Arabia is effectively beached.

Puerto Rico has triggered the biggest municipal default in US history, risking years of bitter legal warfare with creditors and an austerity "death spiral" with echoes of Greece.

The island Commonwealth finally ran out of money yesterday (8/03) after a desperate effort to stay afloat, and missed a final deadline for a $58 million payment - handing over just $628,000.

It implies a sweeping default on much of its $72 billion debt burden, equal to 100% of Puerto Rico’s gross national product (GNP) and more than five times the debt ratio of California or Texas.

Puerto Rico clearly allowed a debt crisis to creep up during the boom years, when the underlying rot was hidden from view and creditors lent without a second thought, banking on an implicit guarantee from the US sovereign state that did not in fact exist.

Clearly there’s blame on both sides with neither taking responsibility. What can be done?

I spent part of last week in Iceland, the antithesis of Greece – and Puerto Rico, now in a death spiral.

It’s been a hard winter and a cold spring up there, but despite the stiff northerly breeze off the Arctic ocean, economically speaking Iceland is basking in real warmth, while their antitheses shiver in financial winter.

Iceland teaches a very acute lesson not only for them but for America, Europe and the world: independence works.

Iceland had a terrible crash equal to Greece’s seven years ago and Puerto Rico’s this week, yet Iceland is now growing rapidly, running trade and budget surpluses, with minimal unemployment and strong pension funds. A settlement with the creditors of its three failed banks is imminent, and exchange controls will soon be lifted.

Here’s how they did it. Will the politicos in Athens and San Juan pay attention?

On Tuesday (7/28), the world lost its collective mind – whatever is left of it, anyway – when media discovered the identity of the killer of a Zimbabwean named Cecil.

Cecil is a lion. Cecil, a lion, was by most accounts “one of Africa’s most famous lions.” Cecil, incredibly, was famous for being a lion, not for curing cancer, although you wouldn’t know that by the media coverage.

The man who shot Cecil, a lion, to death is Dr. Walter Palmer, a dentist in Minnesota who paid $55,000 for a big game permit. Celebrities promptly grabbed their pitchforks for the now-biweekly sport of “let’s find a jackass doing something nasty somewhere on earth and ruin his life to make ourselves feel moral.”

The American media have spilled copious amounts of ink and spent enormous amounts of bandwidth ginning up the mob over the death of Cecil, a lion. Meanwhile, the major media rush to ignore the fact that Democrats now force American taxpayers to foot the bill for hundreds of thousands of murders of babies by organizations including Planned Parenthood.

Before Mohammad Youssduf Adulazeer shot up a military recruiting center in Chattanooga from a car and then sped away, another Mohammed, Abdulhakim Mujahid Mohammed did much the same thing in 2009.

Both struck military recruiting centers in the South, but the 2009 Mohammed had a message for Americans that we unfortunately failed to heed.

"This is not the first attack, and won't be the last," Mohammed warned. “I'm just one Mohammad. There are millions of Mohammeds out there. And I hope and pray the next one be more deadlier than Mohammed Atta!”

There are millions of Mohammeds out there. In a world with lots of Mohammeds, we really need to consider whether we want Mohammed becoming the most common name for a boy in America, as it already has in countries like Britain.

The murderous Mohammeds embody the values of the original Mohammed, the founder of their brutal ideology. They kill like him. They kill in his name. If we don't want Mohammedan murders, we should stop importing Mohammeds.

America does not need immigrants who view mass murderers as role models. On the list of the least desirable immigrants, Mohammed should rank somewhere below a leprous beggar, a convicted rapist with AIDS, and Piers Morgan.

Russia has fallen into full-blown depression and faces a mounting fiscal crisis as oil and gas revenues plummet.

Output from country’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom has collapsed by 19% over the past year as demand shrivels in Europe, falling to levels not seen since the creation of the company at the end of the Cold War.

Gazprom alone generates a tenth of Russian GDP and a fifth of all budget revenues. It will be several years at best before the country benefits from a new pipeline deal with China.

Russia is already in dire straits right now. The economy has contracted by 4.9% over the past year and the downturn is certain to drag on as oil prices crumble after a tentative rally. Half of Russia’s tax income comes from oil and gas.

Core inflation is running at 16.7% and real incomes have fallen by 8.4% over the past year, a far deeper cut to living standards than occurred following the Lehman crisis. This time there is no recovery in sight as Western sanctions remain in place and US shale production limits any rebound in global oil prices.