Netherlands

Presenting Dave Collum's now ubiquitous and all-encompassing annual review of markets and much, much more. From Baptists, Bankers, and Bootleggers to Capitalism, Corporate Debt, Government Corruption, and the Constitution, Dave provides a one-stop-shop summary of everything relevant this year (and how it will affect next year and beyond).

While parts of the world experience economic hardship, a team of Portuguese, UK, Japanese, Italian and Dutch astronomers has found an even bigger slump happening on a cosmic scale. In the largest ever study of its kind, the international team of astronomers has established that the rate of formation of new stars in the Universe is now only 1/30th of its peak and that this decline is only set to continue. The team, led by David Sobral of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society… Dr Sobral comments: “You might say that the universe has been suffering from a long, serious “crisis”: cosmic GDP output is now only 3% of what it used to be at the peak in star production!”

Even as the Nobel peace prize award-winning administration has been vocally partially withdrawing, but never fully, US troops from various middle eastern nations over the past several years, it appears that it has decided to open up a brand new military front, and position US soldiers in yet another hotspot, which is sure to escalate in the future, namely Syria, where yesterday, quietly in the media blanket coverage of the Newtown tragedy, the Pentagon said that some 400 US troops and several Patriot missile batteries would be stationed as part of a NATO force to protect Turkey from "potential Syrian missile attack." As the AP reports, "Defense Secretary Leon Panetta signed a deployment order en route to Turkey from Afghanistan calling for 400 U.S. soldiers to operate two batteries of Patriots at undisclosed locations in Turkey, Pentagon press secretary George Little told reporters flying with Panetta." As is well known to those who follow the local conflict, the traditional narrative is that the US is supporting the oppressed Syrian rebellion, which has been fighting the Assad regime as glorious guerrilla freedom fighters. What is less known is that parts if not all of the Syrian rebellion have an "explicit stamp of approval" from Al Qaeda, the same Al Qaeda, which when useful, is carted out to justify US foreign, and at times very domestic, interventions, and the trampling of all civil liberties (see U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens) , in various other parts of the world.

With gold and silver down this morning - following a mysterious vertical plunge last night (once again) - we thought ConvergEx's Nick Colas' timely discussion of gold was worthwhile. As he notes, Gold is the ultimate personality test for investors.  Some hate it, excoriating its adherents for their lack of faith in human ingenuity – gold has been valuable since before humans could write. And some swear by the yellow metal, in the belief that it is the last vestige of rationality in a world of financial assets manipulated by central banks and opaque trading venues.  What gets lost in the wash is that gold is a commodity and can be analyzed as such. On that basis, here is the 'Top 10' list of real-world fundamentals for gold.

The most commonly forwarded arguments against the implementation of a true 100% gold-backed sound money system can easily be disproven and thoroughly debunked with a small dose of history and another dose of logic.

Today is probably the first day in a while in which minute-by-minute rumors on the Fiscal Cliff will not be on the frontburner (with yet another late day rumor yesterday of an imminent deal turning out to be a dud, when it was reported that Obama's latest grand compromise was to lower his initial tax hike demand from $1.6 to $1.4 trillion, or still $600 billion more than last summer's negotiated number), with Ben Bernanke and QE4 taking center stage instead. By now it is a foregone conclusion that Ben will proceed with extending Twist as first predicted here, into an unsterilized bond buying operation, in effect confirming that there has been zero improvement in the economy, as another $1 trillion is about to be injected until the end of 2013, and more trillions after that. The good thing is that all pretense that the Fed cares about anything but the market is now gone. The bad thing is that the Fed will continue to take over the capital markets until it and the other central banks are the only traders remaining. The only question is whether the market, now well into massively overbought territory, will fizzle and snap back after Bernanke's news announcement, and will QE4EVA (as we believe QE3+1, aka QEternity-er, should be called) have been fully priced in by the time it was announced?