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Monday, 25 July 2016

What we’re tracking this week

House hearings on the value-added tax: Members of the business community will reportedly be invited to a debate tomorrow in the House of Representatives on the proposed VAT.

Interest rates are up for review this week in Egypt, US: The Central Bank of Egypt’s Monetary Policy Committee will meet on Thursday, 28 July to review interest rates. The U.S. Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Markets Committee will meet tomorrow and Wednesday for the same purpose. The Wall Street Journal feels there’s little chance of a rate hike in the US this week, but says the USD will come under pressure as it is “likely [the Fed will] use the meeting as an opportunity to signal that its next move on rates could happen as early as September.”

Hillary Clinton is expected to accept the Democratic party’s nomination on Thursday, the final day of the Democratic National Convention, which gets underway today in Philadelphia.

Reuters’ homepage at dispatch time said it all: “Democrats in disarray ahead of Clinton nomination: The head of the Democratic Party resigned amid a furor over embarrassing leaked emails, hoping to head off a growing rebellion by Bernie Sanders supporters on the eve of Hillary Clinton’s presidential nominating convention. … Trump pulls nearly even with Clinton after Republican convention.”

Dilbert creator Scott Adams and filmmaker Michael Moore both think it’s going to be President Trump: While it has proven to be a fool’s errand for anyone trying to predict the outcomes of this US campaign cycle thus far, we are left agreeing with a number of points made by filmmaker Michael Moore, whose Five Reasons Trump Will Win caused indigestion on lefty Twitter yesterday. The piece runs in a similar vein to Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams’ compelling Donald Trump will win in a landslide published in March. The gist of both pieces, as expressed by Adams: “[Trump] understands humans as 90-percent irrational and acts accordingly… People vote based on emotion. Period… There are plenty of important facts Trump does not know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is — in part — because he knows facts don’t matter… So he ignores them.” Moore largely makes the same point when he writes: “What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here.”

Oh, and the Washington Post formally denounced Trump yesterday on its editorial page: Trump is a unique threat to American democracy.

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