Salient to Investors:

Fareed Zakaria said:

  • New America reports that, since 9-11, 74 people have been killed in America by terrorists vs. over 150,000 killed in gun homicides. ShootingTracker.com says that in the first 207 days of 2015 America had 207 mass shootings. Gunpolicy.org says America’s gun homicide rate is 50 times higher than Germany’s. The US does not have 50 times as many mentally disturbed people as Germany does, but does have very many more guns.
  • ISIS’ neighbors are letting the US fight their battles. The US has carried out over 2,000 air strikes against ISIS in Syria vs. just over 100 by US’ Arab allies.
  • Saudi Arabia is the US’ largest defense customer – 1 out of every 7 defense import dollars. Saudi Arabia and the UAE imported more defense equipment than all of Western Europe.

Anne Applebum at the Washington Post said:

  • The world sees American elections as insane. They are the longest in any democracy and by far the most expensive. There is neither the enormous hope nor the enormous fear attached to the presidency that there has been over the last decade or two. The sense that the world and our lives will all be different depending on who is the next US president is fading away.

Timothy Stanley at the Daily Telegraph said:

  • Lunatics with money are never mad, only eccentric in America.
  • Brits see Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Ross Perot as snake oil salesman who promise everything and then burn up.
  • Europeans see American politics as about money, about buying attention, about personality, but most of all about anger.

Jorge Castaneda at NYU said:

  • Most of Trump’s 16 rivals are not pushing back at all against him, specifically about his racist comments about Mexican, Central American, Caribbean or South American migrants to the US.
  • In Mexico, Jeb Bush is expected to become the Republican nominee and is much liked there.

Mina Al-Oraibi at Asharq Al-Awsat and Yale said people in the Middle East and Iraq still see America as very consequential.

Robert Jordan said:

  • Saudi King Salman was considered one of Saudi Arabia’s least corrupt leaders and its hardest working cabinet member.
  • Saudi Arabia’s strategy appears be against Iran at every turn, and to presume she is behind every negative act. Yemen could come back to haunt Saudi Arabia.

Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi said:

  • No child should be born to work at the cost of their childhood and freedom. 168 million children are full-time child laborers – down from 268 million 20 years ago – of which 85 million work in the worst areas of child labor. Officially, 5.5 million are in virtual slavery. Out-of-school children have dropped from 130 million to 58 million.
  • Anger can be a positive power to fight injustice and to convert ideas into action to make a better world.

Watch the video at http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/category/gps-episodes/ or read the full transcript at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1508/02/fzgps.01.html