ETC

As we noted previously, for the first time ever, primary dealers' corporate bond inventories have turned unprecedentedly negative. While in the short-term Goldman believes this inventory drawdown is probably a by-product of strong customer demand, they are far more cautious longer-term, warning that the "usual suspects" are not sufficient to account for the striking magnitude of inventory declines... and are increasingly of the view that "the tide is going out" on corporate bond market liquidity implying wider spreads and thus higher costs of funding to compensate for the reduction is risk-taking capacity.

Believers in "technology always creates more jobs than it destroys" never address the knotty issues of taxpayer subsidies, secular trends of higher labor costs, the eradication of low-skill jobs that pay enough to live on without taxpayer subsidies, or the structural surplus of conventional labor and capital--the scarcity value of both are dropping to zero. While many hope that every low-skill person can become a high-skilled worker, training people doesn't create jobs for them.

Behold! More shark jumping as BofA, Citi blame warm weather for weak October retail sales: "We believe abnormal weather patterns may have biased retail ex-auto sales lower in October."

To compare someone like Bernie Sanders to bloodthirsty monsters like Stalin and Pol Pot is too ludicrous for words. I've heard of slippery slopes before, but good lord, this guy must be totally off his rocker

Not all is well on Wall Street, where when one cuts all the noise, just one thing matters: the year-end bonus. It is here that as WSJ reports citing the latest survey from Johnson Associates, bonuses are expected to see a broad drop for the first time in four years.

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

"I am talking about the growing minority of students who believe they have a right to be free from being offended.. if this doesn't work for you, I would simply ask you to get the hell out of the country. The ever-growing thinned-skinned minority you have joined is simply ruining life in this once-great nation. Please move to some place like Cuba where you can enjoy the company of communists and get excellent health care. Just hop on a leaky boat and start paddling your way towards utopia. You will not be missed."

"Social Security as a whole as well as Medicare cannot sustain projected long-run program costs...", and that the government should be "giving the public adequate time to prepare."

The 'crapification' of jobs is the direct result of the 'crapification' of the economy.

They called it the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). But it’s one of the most poorly named pieces of legislation in US history. They might as well have called it the “Bank Sell-Your-Customers-Out Act”, because that’s ultimately what it amounts to. The BSA is a cornerstone regulation that requires banks in the Land of the Free to be unpaid spies of the government. Now they’re expanding further into “rewards-based crowdfunding platforms”, sites like Kickstarter which help entrepreneurs find money to start a business.

This is the fifth time in the past three years that the VIX rose 2% of more on a day the S&P 500 also rose, and short-term volatility expectations were at least 10% below longer-term volatility expectations. Those dates were: September 14, 2012, January 21, 2014, August 25, 2014, and May 18, 2015. Over the next month, the S&P 500 was not able to gain more than +1% at its best point, and suffered a loss averaging -3.2% at its worst point. Quite a negative reward-to-risk ratio.

Collapse begins when real reform becomes impossible.

Greece’s Public Power Company is angry. The amount of unpaid bills by its customers has reached the astronomic EUR 2.5 billion. The PPC is so angry that it plans to cut the power to those without outstanding debts as soon as possible - a whopping 2.1 million Greeks face darkness.

Collectivism requires the homogenization of society, to the point that individualism is frowned upon and success is treated as negligible. The nightmare of collectivism is the defining battle of our age. It is in this era that we will decide whether or not individual liberty and freedom of thought are more important than the illusory security and “harmony” of the collective. Collectivism and individualism cannot coexist; confrontation is inevitable. Recognizing this, and preparing for it, is our duty as free human beings.

Why is the price of oil so low now? In fact, why are all commodity prices so low? We see the problem as being an affordability issue that has been hidden by a growing debt bubble. As this debt bubble has expanded, it has kept the sales prices of commodities up with the cost of extraction (Figure 1), even though wages have not been rising as fast as commodity prices since about the year 2000. That period is ending as the productivity of additional debt is falling.