ETC

"The outcome is a defeat both for the Danish government and the main opposition parties who had urged voters to back the proposal, arguing it was necessary for Denmark to combat cross-border crime and remain a member of Europol even after a planned overhaul of the intergovernmental police agency next year."

The gap between real house prices and real earnings is even wider than it was in Housing Bubble 1. History (and common sense) suggest that housing prices will once again fall sharply until the black line of house prices is well below the red line of real earnings. To expect anything different is unrealistic and highly dangerous to one's financial well-being.

The resistance to such an awakening is understandable if still lamentable. If recession is truly the looming assurance, as it increasingly appears, that would mean not just the end of the recovery but the end of “accommodation” as a given force. In other words, Janet Yellen and the OECD start backwards from their endpoint because of their unshakable faith in monetarism, a faith that actually defines how they think an economy does work (and how they produce the core assumptions in their models); should that path from here to there completely unravel, so, too, does their assumed power and philosophy.

When earlier today we read a report in the Greek Enikonomia, according to which Greek taxpayers would be forced to declare all cash "under the mattress" (including inside) or boxes that contain more than 15,000 euros as well as jewelry and precious stones (including gold) worth over 30,000 euros, starting in 2016, we assumed this has to be some early April fools joke or some mistake. However, it was not a joke...

Here's a little ditty on signs of the looming cashless society that the banks are foisting upon the boiling frogs of America.

The S&P 500 has completely disconnected from most risk assets, driven by the usual manipulation during options expiration week, performance gaming by hedge funds before end of the month results are posted, and short covering.

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.