Obamacare

• The Jobs Report Probably Won't Change the Fed's Mind on Liftoff (BBG)
• U.S. authorities look for militant links to shooters in California mass slaying (Reuters)
• Neighbors, Acquaintances Shocked That Couple Are San Bernardino Shooting Suspects (WSJ)
• ECB Fumbles the Stimulus-Baton Hand-off, Mussing Up Fed’s Plans (WSJ)
• OPEC Heads for Status Quo as Members Clash Over Crude Output Cut (BBG)
• Foreigners drawn in as fear and loathing grip China's finance industry (Reuters)

US Services PMI rose from 54.8 in October to 56.1 in November - the highest since May 2015 (but this is a drop from the flash print of 56.5 and 2nd biggest miss against expectations of the year). ISM Services crashed from 59.1 to 55.9 (drastically missing expectations) hovering near its lowest since April 2014. Weakness is across the board with Business Activity, New Orders, Employment, Backlog, Exports and Imports all down. Why is the service economy slipping? Simple, the "Affordable Care Act impacting our business, reducing revenue while increasing cost of care."

"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%."

Americans today are blissfully distracted by their iGadgets, plotting out their holiday shopping strategies, leasing new cars, eating out, and buying advance tickets to the new Star Wars movie. They don’t see the wicked winter squalls ahead which will try their souls. We are experiencing the lull before the storms, but the storms are surely coming. The potential for catastrophe is high and burying our heads in the sand is not a strategy.

• The best performing asset class of this Millennium is gold, by a country mile.........

It's the kind of business plan that would be laughed out of a business school classroom. "The co-ops were essentially amateur exercises." Why not scrap the perverse ACA regulations and admit it was a pipe dream to ever assume young, healthy people could be coerced into paying several times their expected costs to cover other people’s excessive spending.

"Fake", a simple definition: something that is not what it purports to be, a worthless imitation passed off as genuine; an impostor or charlatan.

Example: “American society is extraordinarily fake; filled with lies, fraud, facades, mirages, deception, disinformation, misinformation, propaganda and brainwashing.”

Janet Yellen’s astonishing letter to the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, is a sign that the central bank is panicking over the fact that Congress is unhappy with the job it has been doing.

Today we got confirmation that the spinning plates of the Affordable Care Act are finally falling down, when none other than the U.S.’s biggest health insurer, UnitedHealth, cut its 2015 earnings forecast with a warning that it was considering pulling out of Obamacare, just one month after saying it would expand its presence in the program. 

The Fed has created a dead end street for everyone not in their .1% clientele... We’re all muppets to the banking cabal running this morally and financially bankrupt military empire of debt.

It turns out that Obamacare's "affordable care" is affordable, as long as one doesn't actually have to use it! Here is what happens when one does.

If it looks like a recession, walks like a recession and quacks like a recession, it’s a recession.

The housing recovery without mortgage originations is coming to its inevitable conclusion.

There is a very clear distinction in which cities US consumers are doing well, versus cities in which they have been tapped out. For those wondering where the US consumer is all spent out, look no further than the cities at the bottom of this chart.