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.