Archive - Dec 2014

The sixth anniversary of Zero Hedge is just around the corner, and so, for the sixth year in a row we continue our tradition of summarizing what you, our readers, found to be the most relevant, exciting, and actionable news of the year, determined by the number of page views. Those eager for a brief stroll down memory lane of prior years can do so at their leisure, by going back in time to our top articles of 2009,2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. For everyone else, without further ado, these are the articles that readers found to be the most popular posts of the past 365 days.

It was a good year for those long 'beheadings'. After a solid 79 head-removals in 2013, 2014 surged 10% higher with a recent record 87 beheadings overall (following a surge since August for crimes such as "drug smuggling, witchcraft, or sorcery"). The 'State' responsible for all these executions... not ISIS, but US ally, Saudi Arabia...

"As a former military analyst myself I can tell you that by now the Russian intelligence community's "indicators and warnings" should be "flashing red" and that in all likelihood Russia is already preparing for war..."

Please pardon this interruption as we bring you a very important update from Hawaii, courtesy of the Associated Press.

Amid the European crisis in 2012, European banks reached deep deep down to encourage depositors to lodge their savings in these highly levered financial institutions. Most notably, now defunct Bankia, which offered no lesser gift than a Spiderman Towel in exchange for a EUR300 deposit. So, one wonders just how desperate they are - and just how close to total collapse - when Chinese banks are offering Mercedes Benz, iPhones, or a gold pendant to encourage cash as Bloomberg reports one analyst warns, "Chinese banks are hemorrhaging their deposits."

"An increasingly muscular minority political base is here to stay," says Politico, and nowhere is that minority more in charge in America than shown in the following map. As the white population continues to age (only 51% of Under-5s were white in 2010), racial minorities will pick up the slack (by 2027, minorities will out-number whites nationally among those under 30). Already, 10 states have “minority white” child populations, including reliably red states like Texas and Arizona.

If you have a strongly held economic theory, you can always concoct a story ex post to “explain” the data. Rather, what I’m saying is that on the very terms Krugman himself chose to show the virtues of government spending, I can make a much more compelling argument that cutting government spending won’t hurt private sector hiring, and if anything will stimulate it.

Hugh Hendry's Eclectica Fund has had a great Q4 (up 3.3%, 4.0%, and 5.0% in the last 3 months) despite portfolio risk being quadruple his 'old normal'. How did he achieve this? He begins... "There are times when an investor has no choice but to behave as though he believes in things that don't necessarily exist. For us, that means being willing to be long risk assets in the full knowledge of two things: that those assets may have no qualitative support; and second, that this is all going to end painfully. The good news is that mankind clearly has the ability to suspend rational judgment long and often... He who hangs on to truth has lost. The economic truth of today no longer offers me much solace; I am taking the blue pills now."

The Agency Which DID the Torture Says It Doesn’t Work

Presented with no comment...

Before we first exposed proof of the conspiracy fact that global Central Banks are indeed trading US equity futures, it was dismissed as tin-foil-hat-wearing, pajama-wearing, basement-living conspiracy theory. So it is, perhaps, quite notable that Congress itself has now admitted that Central Banks are trading futures and that it is good for liquidity (and thus, we pre-suppose, it's for your own good, average citizen).

A Florida man calls 9-1-1...

2014 is in the bag and there's something for everyone to celebrate. Here are the narratives that painted the past year - what’s real about them versus what we’re being told they are about.