ETC

For all intents and purposes, the National Security Agency has supposedly ceased its bulk collection of metadata from Americans’ phone calls, but read the fine print: nothing is going to change.

It’s an unfortunate truth that, when people are worried about the future, they often put their faith in politicians to somehow make everything better. The hard truth, however, is that if we have a savior, he is the man in the mirror. If we are to be saved, we alone must do the research, make the plans, vote with our feet, and establish our own liberty.

"We are lowering our 2015 S&P500 EPS estimate from $124 to $120.5. This is to both mark-to-market for weaker Q3 results and to reduce our estimates for January earnings. The consensus bottom-up number is roughly $119. This means we anticipate earnings growing just over 1% in 2015 year-over-year, not counting a net buyback of about 2.3%."

• The best performing asset class of this Millennium is gold, by a country mile.........

Forgotten what 2008 was like? What's coming will be far worse.

With at least 83 percent of these companies' operating cash being spent on debt repayments - the highest on record - the renewed collapse in crude oil prices of the last month has renewed focus on the tidal wave of defaults that the credit market is increasingly pricing in (and stocks not).

After failed breakouts earlier in the year, the charts of the Asian Tiger Cub markets suggest more trouble may lie ahead... as The Fed's decision looms.

If we assume that China’s hard landing can and will get hard-er-er, it’s worth asking which assets and currencies have priced in a further deceleration in the world’s engine of global growth and trade. Barclays has more on what’s expensive and what’s cheap vis-a-vis persistent deterioration in the Chinese growth story.

Consider how insulting it is! Why is the president of the country better qualified than we are to determine where our resources will do the most good? Why are members of Congress or local politicians? Who on earth do these folks think they are? Advocates of government wealth redistribution blatantly insult the rest of us by denying us the good sense it takes to spend our wealth.

When I was a boy, a carnival would come through town annually, with a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round and, of course, a midway

How Uncle Sam seeded global Jihad... and cultivates it to this day.

The people of Europe have been the patsies in this grand scheme and are, at this point, experiencing decided buyer’s remorse.

It would not be unprecedented for trendy issues like the F.A.N.G. stocks to continue on to much larger gains... But just ask the Turkeys how this ends.

In the wilderness of the New World, the Plymouth Pilgrims had progressed from the false dream of communism to the sound realism of capitalism. This year, at a time of economic uncertainty and growing political paternalism, when we, Americans sit around our dining table with family and friends, we should remember that what we are really celebrating is the birth of free men and free enterprise in that New World of America. The true meaning of Thanksgiving, in other words, is the triumph of Capitalism over the failure of Collectivism in all its forms.

Any modest reduction in debt, tax revenues, consumption or new borrowing will bring the entire Status Quo crashing down. This is the bitter fruit of rampant financialization and the ascendancy of maximizing private gain by whatever means are available.