Well this is going to hurt: Der Spiegel reports that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has ordered that all government contracts cease being awarded to German companies in what's being interpreted as an aggressive punitive measure after a year of already deteriorating Saudi-German relations and as Germany has expressed its plan to stick by the Iran nuclear deal.

The summer season is often about renewed hope and revelry in comfort, and this goes for economic comfort as much as anything else. In parallel to the old tale of The Ant And The Grasshopper, we are all tempted to act like the grasshopper, forget about the trials and tribulations of the world and take a vacation from awareness.

I am seeing quite a lot of this in the past month as mounting global tensions appear to have subsided. But appearances can be deceiving...

Bad management, corruption and a failure of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to generate expected levels of foreign investment compound the problem.

In a sign the currency’s status in international finance is on the rise, and just a few short weeks after China unveiled its Yuan-denominated oil futures contract, the CEO of the London Metal Exchange has confirmed that it is planning to introduce yuan-denominated metal products.

In a genuinely free society (as compared to an unfree society that only purports to be free), people keep their own money and decide what they wish to do with it. Some donate to this cause, others donate to that cause, and some don’t make any donations at all.

That was one of the basic principles of freedom on which the United States was founded. Our American ancestors decided that this would be a society in which there would be no income taxation or IRS. Thus, for more than 100 years, the American people were free to keep everything they earned.

By the same token, no one was forced to share his income with others. In other words, no mandatory charity. That’s because our American ancestors believed that no one should be forced to be good and caring. If donations were to occur, they would have to come voluntarily and willingly from the income that people were free to keep.

The common theme here is that Trump's sanctions against Russia - with which he is supposedly colluding - not only work, but are very effective in achieving their goal. And they do so though the biggest weapon the US has: access to the world's reserve currency, because with one phone call to SWIFT, Trump can lock out an entire nation.

So what alternatives is Russia planning, aside of course from increasingly closer trade, financial and monetary ties to China, which renminbi many speculate is only a matter of time before it replaces the USD as the world's reserve currency?

Addressing precisely this issue, Russia's Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum that settlements in US currency could be dropped by Russia in favor of the euro. That said, Russia would only engage in such an unprecedented transition under one condition: if the EU takes a stand against the latest US sanctions on Moscow.

President Donald Trump signed the biggest rollback of bank regulations since the global financial crisis into law Thursday.

The measure designed to ease rules on all but the largest banks passed both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support. Backers say the legislation will lift burdens unnecessarily put on small and medium-sized lenders by the Dodd-Frank financial reform act and boost economic growth.

Opponents, however, have argued the changes could open taxpayers to more liability if the financial system collapses or increase the chances of discrimination in mortgage lending.

In his first statement since Pompeo's Wednesday speech, Iran's Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei set 7 conditions for the European nations if they want Tehran to remain in the agreement.

Khamenei laid out the full list on Twitter on Trump's favorite social media network, remainder of continued on twitter where in a brief tweetstorm, he unveiled the following demands of Europe:

Over the course of 2 years, US violated #JCPOA, several times, while the Europeans remained silent. These 3 European countries should prove that they won’t be as dishonest & untrustworthy as they were during nuclear talks in 2004-2005. Europe needs to compensate for it:
The US has violated Resolution 2231. Europe must issue a resolution against US’s violation [of it].
Europe must guarantee it will not raise the issue of the Islamic Republic's missiles and regional affairs.

Unknown hackers have reportedly infected at least 500,000 routers and other network devices all over the world with sophisticated and potentially destructive malware—and the Ukrainian government believes Russian hackers may use this botnet in an attack ahead of the Champions League soccer final this week in Kiev.

On Wednesday, Cisco’s subsidiary Talos warned of this new malware campaign, dubbing it “VPNFilter” because that’s the name of the folder where the malware creates and installs itself on the infected devices. Talos researchers wrote that VPNFilter’s most dangerous feature is that it can make the devices it lives on completely unusable thanks to a “kill” command.

“If it suited their goals, this command could be executed on a broad scale, potentially rendering hundreds of thousands of devices unusable, disabling internet access for hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide or in a focused region where it suited the actor's purposes,” the Talos report read.