Greece

Many people are cheering now that yesterday Marine Le Pen and her Front National (FN) party didn’t get to take over government in any regions in the France regional elections. They should think again. FN did get a lot more votes than the last time around, and, though she will be a little disappointed after last weekend’s results, it’s exactly as Le Pen herself said: “Nothing can stop us”.

As in George Orwell’s 1984, the IMF is dividing the world into warring factions - the West vs. the BRICS. To avoid the coming conflict that the neoconservatives’ pursuit of American hegemony is bringing, the Russians have relied on fact-based, truth-based diplomacy. However, neocon Washington relies on lies and propaganda and has many more and much louder voices. Consequently, it is Washington’s lies, not Russia’s truth, that most of the Western sheeple believe. The Western peoples are so dimwitted that they have not yet understood that the “war on terror” is, in fact, a war to create terror that can be exported to Muslim areas of Russia and China in order to destabilize the two countries that serve as a check on Washington’s unilateral, hegemonic power.

This is where the Fed. now finds itself. Here they were. Just holding policy lines doing what they in their Ivory Tower contemplated and the so-called “smart crowd” insisted they do. And now the saying of “Between a rock and a hard place” might be an understatement. The world sits atop a tinderbox fueled by monetary policies that created them and awaits a match that could set it off in a blaze of who knows what. All in short order. Unless they don’t do anything except try their best Draghi impersonation and declare, “They too are once again at the ready to do what ever it takes!” Except – just not now.

Great news! The "greatest threat to future generations of the world" has apparently been solved. World leaders Saturday adopted an historic international climate accord in Paris, the first-ever agreement to commit almost every country to fight climate change. However, as we knew all along and just got confirmation, the 31-page pact does not have binding language or a mechanism to force countries to live up to the promises to cut greenhouse gases.

"The move would arguably represent the biggest transfer of sovereignty since the creation of the single currency."

Having won Time's "Person of the Year" award, German chancellor Angela Merkel may have little time, or cause, for celebration. The reason for that is shown in the chart below.

 The analogy is as if you notice an ember smoldering in a combustible forest you might be only somewhat cautious, perhaps even rationalizing it away.  But if you then notice a second ember smoking up...

Since laste June, "local investors" have been restricted to only being allowed to buy shares and disallowed from withdrawing cash from accounts. Those restrictions did not stop the stock market from collapsing further and today authorities have decided to lift those capital controls... the result - ASE has plunged below mid-Summer lows to its lowest since June 2009...

When Time magazine announced the short list of its Persons of the Year for 2015, there was some consternation that the winner could be ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or, maybe even worse according to the US press, Donald Trump. Instead, according to the just announced final results, the two gentlemen are in positions #2 and #3 respectively, with the winner being Germany's iron chancellor, Angela Merkel, whose position however in the aftermath of Europe's historic refugee crisis, has been downgraded from "iron" to quite shaky in recent weeks.

"I think it was really a massive failure of market analysts," Nowotny told a news conference, adding that those analysts should have paid more attention to economic fundamentals.  The comedy continued when Nowotny said that "the ECB can and will not let itself be pushed by the markets," adding that "it’s not our job to correct wrong expectations of individuals” and “it wasn’t the view of the whole market." Which, of course, was a lie.

Sales of American Eagle gold coins at the U.S. Mint surged in November, with gold demand nearly tripling month-over-month. China's gold reserves rose by another 21 tonnes in November, the biggest bout of gold buying since China began disclosing monthly data on it's gold reserves in June

Despite these very high levels of demand, gold prices fell sharply in November - from $1,141/oz to $1,070/oz or 6.6%.

While no longer making headlines in the mainstream media, cash remains a scarce commodity in Greece. In response, Greeks have done what all people do when they cannot get enough currency - they improvise. Greece is right where Weimar Germany was in late 1922... In 1922, as in 2015, virtually everyone failed to recognise that monetary movement is circular in nature, not linear. All payments, for all goods and services, impact each other, in a domino effect.

Over the last few months, in a prime example of currency failure and euro-defenders' narratives, Finland has been sliding deeper into depression. Almost 7 years into the the current global expansion, Finland's GDP is 6pc below its previous peak. As The Telegraph reports, this is a deeper and more protracted slump than the post-Soviet crash of the early 1990s, or the Great Depression of the 1930s. And so, having tried it all, Finnish authorities are preparing to unleash "helicopter money" to save their nation by giving every citizen a tax-free payout of around $900 each month!

“The new levy raised the estimated cumulative income tax on Wal-Mart Puerto Rico Inc. to an astonishing and unsustainable 91.5% of its net income!”