Archive - Dec 21, 2015 - Story

A new whistleblower has leaked a catalog of cell phone surveillance devices used by the military, intelligence agencies, and local police departments, including the controversial ‘Stingray’ spying tool. At this point, it’s painfully obvious that America is the home of the Police-Surveillance State. Privacy is a dying notion in a nation of fools determined to be safe rather than liberated. If you give a damn, now is the time to stand up and be heard.

"Everything is clean and perfectly safe. Any radioactive materials are miles away"...

There are many half-truths perpetrated on individuals by Wall Street to sell product, gain assets, etc. However, if individuals took a moment to think about it, the illogic of many of these arguments are readily apparent. The index is a mythical creature, like the Unicorn, and chasing it has historically led to disappointment. Investing is not a competition, and there are horrid consequences for treating it as such.

In September, interbank credit markets flashed a quick and brief warning that something was up... and Janet folded. Three months later and following The Fed's oddly-timed rate-hike, interbank counterparty risk - as proxied by The TED-Spread - has spiked over 45% in 2 days, the most since Sept 2008 (Lehman).

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s seminal masterpiece Crime and Punishment is often thought of as one of the longest classics at more than 200,000 words. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, which was signed into law on Friday, is nearly twice as long. At 887 pages, the bill allocates $1.15 trillion in war and discretionary spending for fiscal year 2016 which began almost three months ago. (That’s an average of $1.3 billion in spending PER PAGE of the bill.) In making it public law, President Obama has effectively signed the death warrant of the US government’s finances.

Because the Novo Banco auction process went so smoothly, Portugal has decided to throw billions more in taxpayer dollars at a failed lender. This time it's Banif, which will be split into a "good" and "bad" bank just weeks ahead of new EU rules that would have seen uninsured depositors take a haircut as part of the wind down process.

And the hits keep coming...

*CDC INVESTIGATING ANOTHER, MORE RECENT OUTBREAK OF E. COLI
*CDC: 53 INFECTED WITH E.COLI STEC 026 REPORTED FROM 9 STATES

And the stock is down over 5% now...

The Dow Transportation Index is down almost 19% year-to-date. As Jim Bianco details, 2015 is set to be the worst non-recession year for these economically-sensitive stocks since 1917...

Oil's hope for a bottom anytime soon appears to stand Snow White's chance in hell of coming true. Seventy-eight years after Walt Disney released the first full-length animated feature, and seven factors in today’s crude complex are dwarfing crude prices.

While the fear and loathing of gold by the "smart money" and central banks has been extensively documented in recent years, another asset class is emerging as the "most hated" within the speculator community: treasurys, or rather, duration.

Janet, where is your accelerating economy?

The 'death cross' of these two energy market indicators is all one needs to know about the oil market...

Presented with no comment...

There's this - *LOCKHART: FED RATE RISE WAS VOTE OF CONFIDENCE IN U.S. ECONOMY

And then there's the market's reaction to this "vote of confidence."