Fail

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse for Obamacare, it gets worse.

Most investors don’t take kindly to change. “The market” chooses to stay in the here and now; each human component vibrant and alert while the whole is passive and inert…like a herd of wildebeests, protected by its mass and collective wisdom that each one of them is statistically safe from lions as long as they stay together.

“It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.”

While the Valeant soap opera has had constant, heart-pounding drama for weeks and following yesterday's report that it allegedly fabricated prescriptions, even an element of career-ending (and prison-time launching) criminality, so far one thing had been missing: an antagonist tied to Goldman Sachs. We are delighted to reveal the "missing link", one which ties everything together. Its name is Howard Schiller.

Passports are nothing more than a form of control - a way to obtain oodles of personal information and to restrict one of the most basic freedoms of humanity - the freedom to move. So you can imagine how excited we were when we read about Australia’s government announcing a program to eliminate passports. Great news, right? Well, no...

"... judging from market-based implied measures of longer-term inflation expectations, the effectiveness of the ECB’s announcements has proved limited so far."

- Goldman Sachs

For six years, the world has operated under a complete delusion that Central Banks somehow fixed the 2008 Crisis.

"In a warren of tiny shops beneath grimy residential towers, a white-haired man selling Snickers bars and fizzy drinks from a kiosk no larger than a cashier’s booth is figuring out a way to move $100,000 out of China"...

If you still haven’t heard of the psychotic violence perpetrated on a high school girl by Senior Deputy Ben Fields, it’s time to get up to speed (before he is fired this afternoon). If you want a gauge as to how far this society has fallen, this is all you need to see.

We live in an era of illusion: the illusion of understanding, and the illusion of control. The net result is nonsensical policies that fail to achieve their stated objectives.

If you haven’t already, now’s the time to get out your party hats to celebrate the 14th anniversary of the USA PATRIOT Act. You know about the law, I’m sure; passed barely six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the USA PATRIOT Act is one of the most sweeping, liberty-destroying pieces of legislation in American history.

Impunity has been the norm. The reason there have been no efforts made to criminally investigate is obvious. Former banking regulator and current securities Professor Bill Black told Bill Moyers  that "Timothy Geithner, then Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong."

Sorry Fed, here is why your attempt at terminal reflation was doomed from day one.

Have you noticed that things have gotten eerily quiet in the month of October? For those that don’t want to believe that hard times are on the way, they can take comfort in the eerie period of calm that we are experiencing right now. What they don’t realize is that this truly is “the calm before the storm”, and the global economic crisis that is ahead of us is going to be far beyond what most people ever dared to imagine was possible.

It will become clearer, fast, what an awful mess Brussels and Berlin have created here, because with winter approaching more refugees will fall victim to the conditions under which they’re forced to live once they’ve entered Europe. Which, in their own eyes, will still be preferable to the conditions in their homelands. And then what will we do, when dozens start dying from cold and diseases? Send in more police and military? This is a road to a very bleak nowhere.