Last week Venezuela devalued its currency, the bolivar, by 95%, cutting five zeros off the exchange rate. This measure was a desperate response to hyperinflation that reached an astonishing rate of 83,000% YoY in July, with prices doubling every 26 days.

As is the custom for Fed chairs, Chairman Powell provided the kickoff address to the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium, broadly attended by many of the world’s central bankers.

Mr. David Malpass, at the US Treasury, will meet with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen in late August. This is excellent news.

Dennis Gartman beat me to this on Thursday morning. I’m in complete agreement with Dennis’ assessment:

“Is there a vaccine now for Zika?” I asked Dr. Judy Monroe, president-CEO of the CDC Foundation. “Not yet, but we’re working on it,” she answered. For a YouTube of my interview with Judy when she visited Camp Kotok, see https://youtu.be/rge2tC74kSc.

August has brought welcome news for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and for creditors eager to see a resolution to the bankruptcy process that started more than two years ago with the passage of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA).

Let’s see. An American company with American employees catches fish. It ships the fish to China. China imposes a tariff or retaliatory tariff when the fish arrives from America.

The Turkish lira is down more than 40% year to date, with Friday’s fall alone reaching 18.5% at one point and ending down 14.3% for the day. While Turkey’s economy is not large, some major European banks have big exposures in non-lira loans.

We will offer readers a few references so they can become quick studies on why certain changes in the tax code are distorting the shape of the yield curve (flattening it) and why that distorting effect will change in about six weeks.

We thank many readers for their responses to our three-part Western trip series.

For those who missed them, we will list the three links here:

Yesterday the Bank of Japan (BOJ) announced in a report “Strengthening the Framework for Continuous Powerful Monetary Easing” that its extraordinary policies will be maintained for an “extended period of time”.