ETC

...and a trader who doesn’t pay attention to the modern realities of market structure and liquidity provision is not long for this world.

The point is, if you are going to attempt to catch a proverbial falling knife on a chart, at least do so only at a point you deem to be a “make or break” type level. Whether or not you can likely accurately identify a “make or break” level is another matter. The point is that, should that level fail, like it did on the CRB Index a year ago, you know the security is broken and it is time to walk away.

Year end 2015, we go from Ponzi scheme to failure to the thing every major global bank desires. The dilemma is, the ingenuity to excel in this space lies in scrappy young startups, not trillion dollar mega banks. Let me prove this to you, step by prior art step.

How would a Fed hike be transmitted? To the uninitiated, it might seem as though Janet Yellen snaps her fingers or twitches her nose and just like that, banks and money markets price in the 25bps. But contrary to Haruhiko Kuroda's characterization of central bankers as fairy tale protagonists, it's not as simple as waving a magic wand and in the US, the whole show runs through Bill Dudley's Open Market Trading Desk at the New York Fed.

"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.