B+

"As we progressed through the quarter, conditions softened. And September was especially weak, particularly in the U.S. product businesses....September typically is the strongest month of the year... There appears to be a general slowdown in U.S. industrial customer spending, both capital and operating spending.... we're not expecting to see sequential growth until the second half of the year (2016)"

- Keith Norbusch, ROK CEO

Goldman Sachs -> Treasury -> PIMCO -> The Fed

Late last week, a consortium of financial regulators in the United States, including the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, issued an astonishing condemnation of the US banking system, highlighting “continuing gaps between industry practices and the expectations for safe and sound banking.” They identified a huge jump in risky loans due to overexposure to weakening oil and gas industries. Make no mistake; this is not chump change. The total exceeds $3.9 trillion worth of risky loans that US banks made with your money. Given that even the Fed is concerned about this, alarm bells should be ringing.

Repeated dosages of quantitative easing to kick-start economic recovery have proved totally ineffective everywhere. Yet central bankers are talking about doing it again – in larger amounts. The obsession with spending rather than saving has led governments everywhere to suppress interest rates to near zero. Under this destructive economic model governments are the worst offenders. In their craze to spend cheap money they allocate resources blindly into projects of dubious viability, for which there was no public demand in the first place. Result: huge taxpayer-borne losses.

We're gonna need a bigger buyback... As if "old tech" IBM was not in enough trouble, the worrying admission from Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway's earnings of around $2 billion (though careful to note he is not about to sell) has seemingly prompted further weakness. IBM is down almost 2% to fresh May 2010 lows...

Last week, we asked if silver would have a 14 handle again. This week, the market answered yes we can! How did we know? By looking at supply and demand.

Why - after commodities - China is set to change the landscape on energy in the coming years

Perhaps realizing that another wave of social unrest and failure to obtain creditor cash may well lead to a violent social upheaval, Tsipras seems to be contemplating a Plan B, one which would see Greece accept thousands of refugees destined for Europe in exchange for getting the earmarked cash without any reform.

In the last 24 months, Canada, New Zealand, the US, the UK, and now Germany have all implemented legislation that would allow them to first FREEZE and then SEIZE bank assets during the next crisis.

This time is always different just before a bone-crushing decline.

Over the past decade; our markets have ceased to behave like “markets”, at all. 

Bitcoin, at $444, is now up over 100% since we suggested, in early September, it would become the conduit for Chinese capital outflows following China's crackdown on capital controls. This afternoon's sudden BIS-induced plunge, taking the virtual currency down $50, has been entirely retraced and more as BTCC (China's leading Bitcoin Exchange) announced it will now accept direct deposits (making it significantly easier for Chinese to rotate their Yuan deposits into the virtual currency and out of the potential clutches of capital controlling communists).

You will not be warned of the risks to your wealth by anyone in a position of power in the political financial hierarchy.