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Watch Spain closely in the months ahead. It will be another canary in the coal mine for the entire Western world.

Governments Have Suppressed the Dangers of Epidemics Before, Only Making Things Worse

• Republicans expect gains, but many races close on election day (Reuters)
• Ahead of tough election, White House blames dismay with Washington (Reuters)
• On Election Day, a Tale of the Young and the Old (WSJ)
• Because the recovery: Sprint to Cut 2,000 Jobs as Mobile Customers Keep Leaving (BBG)
• Ukraine's rebel leader is sworn in, crisis deepens (Reuters)
• Brilliant: Burkina Faso Army Promises Religious Leaders It Will Step Down (BBG)
• More Unknowns Leave Central Banks Facing Greater Internal Strife (BBG)
• Scapegoat found: IBM to Change Leadership at Global Services Unit (WSJ)
• Explains why Europe just slashed its GDP forecast: Don’t Be Fooled by Warm Spell as Cold Air About to Return (BBG)

With the Swiss gold stored at the Bank of Canada, now having been transferred out of the Bank of Canada’s Ottawa vault to an unknown location, the Swiss public would be wise to question the SNB on this move. The Swiss gold stored at the Bank of England in London seemingly being ‘actively managed’ one of the world’s largest centres for unallocated gold trading, the Swiss public would also be wise to enquire on this issue. And with significant historical quantities of Swiss gold that were stored with the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York no longer there after the SNB seemingly brought their US vaulted gold holdings to zero, the Swiss public need to question why these particular holdings were targeted for sales from 2000-2005 and not domestically held gold.

"Solutions to the world's problems are not produced in a meeting between Bill Gates and George Soros... Renewal has to come from below... Limiting the influence [of the richest] is of the utmost importance... so that today's upper-class, high-finance capitalism can once again revert to being a capitalism of the real economy and the societal center."

The excesses of 1980s New York investment banking as captured best (and with just a dose of hyperbole) by Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho may be long gone in the US, but they certainly are alive and well in other banking meccas, such as the one place where every financier wants to work these days (thanks to the Chinese government making it rain credit): Hong Kong. It is here that yesterday a 29-year-old British banker, Rurik Jutting, a Cambridge University grad and current Bank of America Merrill Lynch, former Barclays employee, was arrested in connection with the grisly murder of two prostitutes. One of the two victims had been hidden in a suitcase on a balcony, while the other, a foreign woman of between 25 and 30, was found lying inside the apartment with wounds to her neck and buttocks, the police said in a statement.

At what point does revolution take place? In our review of history, the probability is low but for the economic trend. In other words, turn the economy down and the percent of discontent rises exponentially. So beware – not ghosts and goblins, but politicians going forward. The problem is not that Americans are ignorant, they are being fed nonsense by the media to sell newspaper and TV advertising. We have fallen into a cycle of Yellow Journalism that was begun by Pulitzer. So perhaps Americans will wise up only when the economy turns down and the Internet provides a greater proportion of real news compared to mainstream media.

"We are all wrong so often that it amazes me that we can have any conviction at all over the direction of things to come. But we must." - Cramer

"Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them." - Immanuel Kant

There it was --- a real market come and gone in half an hour, like a pregnant panda at Edinburgh zoo. What did it mean and what should you do? You should pay attention to what happens to the direction of prices when volumes surge and markets work. When the veil is lifted, pay attention to what you see beneath. Last Wednesday, in the space of half an hour of active trading, the Treasury market had one of its most rapid rises ever recorded and equities fell sharply. There is a very simple lesson that when the markets finally break through the manipulation they move to price in deflation and not inflation. This is key because it means financial repression has failed. Such repression requires the artificial depression of interest rates but, crucially, it must be paired with boosting inflation above such rates. On October 15th 2014, if only for a few short minutes, market forces broke out and the failure of central bankers was briefly evident.

• Fed set to end one crisis chapter even as global risks rise (Reuters)... you mean, for the third time?
• Insider-Trading Probe Focuses on Medicare Agency (WSJ)
• He's sorry: Rajoy Apologizes as New Wave of Graft Allegations Hits Spain (BBG)
• China could 'punish' Hong Kong over protests, says ex-HK central bank chief (Reuters)
• Dubai Insists the Boom is Not a Bubble This Time Around (BBG)
• Bank-Data Sharing Accord Expands Push to Find Tax Cheats (BBG)
• Deutsche Bank Sinks to Third-Quarter Loss on Legal Costs (BBG)
• Kim Jong Un Executes 10 Officials for Watching Soap Operas (BBG)
• French drugmaker Sanofi sacks CEO Viehbacher (Reuters)

"Since 9/11, those thank yous have been aimed at veterans with the regularity of the machine gun fire that may still haunt their dreams. Veterans have also been offered special consideration when it comes to applications for mostly menial jobs so that they can “utilize the skills” they learned in the military. While they continue to march in those welcome home parades and have concerts organized in their honor, the thank yous are in no short supply. The only question that never seems to come up is: What exactly are they being thanked for?"

The Swiss establishment has been reliant upon the public’s ignorance, but now they are up against a formidable opponent in Egon von Greyerz. Not only that, but they can clearly see that, as elsewhere around the world, the public is fast becoming disenchanted with the status quo; and that is potentially very dangerous for these people. What is important to understand here is that if the initiative passes it will be part of the Swiss constitution IMMEDIATELY - as some are suggesting. This means that the government and parliament cannot touch it. Only another referendum can change it. This is proper democracy for you. The closer we get to the vote on November 30, the bigger this story is going to become, and the bigger it becomes, the higher the chance that the yes vote wins. Should that happen, it will undoubtedly set off alarm bells throughout the gold market, as yet more physical gold will need to be repatriated and another sizeable, price-insensitive buyer will enter the marketplace.

Who can forget China's ghost city of Ordos: back in late 2009, when the hollow shell behind China's torrid growth was first revealed to the world, the city near China's Mongolia border was cooler talk for weeks. Fast forward five years later, and Ordos is all but forgotten, having been eclipsed by a veritable army of much bigger "ghosts" that make up the "ghost town network" - a list of cities created by the China Investment Network, a business newspaper in Beijing, to determine which cities were the most ghostly. Below we present the 10 biggest ones.

The worst thing about the government’s reckless response to the financial crisis of 2008, even worse than the trillions in taxpayer bailouts and backstops granted to the financial criminals that created the disaster, is the primary lesson that it sent to American society as a whole. Some people like to call it “moral hazard,” but in more pedestrian terms it really just boils down to: The Bad Guys Got Away with It... "The California Highway Patrol officer accused of stealing nude photos from a DUI suspect’s phone told investigators that he and his fellow officers have been trading such images for years, in a practice that stretches from its Los Angeles office to his own Dublin station."

"They laud and promote the myth of American democracy - even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism. They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia." The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot official propaganda to the masses.