Reality

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently." – Warren Buffett

It appears not!!

Rare is the ‘aware’ individual who engages in little more than window dressing in re-ordering our lives in preparation for the inevitable……that which is not self sustaining will not continue.

"In the media they wrote that we were training in an FSA military camp, but in fact, all 60 of us were members of Daesh. We were Syrian nationals, many of whom in the beginning moved to Turkey to earn some money, and then joined Daesh."

We apologize, but 2015 had so many negatives that we’re having trouble seeing the positives. It’s like we’re on the Titanic, and it’s tilting at an 85-degree angle with its propellers way up in the air, and we’re dangling over the cold Atlantic trying to tell ourselves: “At least there’s no waiting for the shuffleboard courts!” Are we saying that 2015 was the worst year ever? Are we saying it was worse than, for example, 1347, the year when the Bubonic Plague killed a large part of humanity? Yes, we are saying that.

Three years after 2012, Goldman has finally admitted that all the talk about a major exodus of your Americans from parental houses and into the harsh crony capitalist world, was nothing but hot air. As the chart below shows, the share of 18-34-year-olds living with their parents has never been higher.

As SOE profits continue to deteriorate at the expense of maximizing jobs and employment (recall the biggest threat facing China is a working class insurrection, or simply said, "lower and middle-class revolution") debt at these same SOEs just hit a new record high: according to the same FinMin numbers, total SOE debt rose by CNY393 billion to CNY78.3 trillion, or over $12 trillion - well above 100% of total Chinese GDP.

In American politics the nation of Russia, especially as personified in its leader Vladimir Putin, becomes all things to all men. To American leftists, Russia is a neo-fascist, violently nationalist country that ruthlessly suppressed minority groups, especially homosexuals. To the American Right, Putin is the second coming of Stalin who is working to subvert good old-fashioned American values around the world.

There’s only one investment we can think of that many people either love or hate reflexively, almost without regard to market performance: gold. And, to a lesser degree, silver. It’s strange that these two metals provoke such powerful psychological reactions - especially among people who dislike them. Nobody has an instinctive hatred of iron, copper, aluminum, or cobalt. The reason, of course, is that the main use of gold has always been as money. And people have strong feelings about money. From an economic viewpoint, however, money is just a medium of exchange and a store of value. Efforts to turn it into a political football invariably are signs of a hidden agenda, or perhaps a psychological aberration. So, let’s take some recent statements, assertions, and opinions that have been promulgated in the media and analyze them.

With all the action in Syria, the Ukraine is no longer a subject for discussion in the West. In Russia, where the Ukraine is still a major problem looming on the horizon, and where some 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees are settling in, with no intentions of going back to what's left of the Ukraine, it is still actively discussed. But for the US, and for the EU, it is now yet another major foreign policy embarrassment, and the less said about it the better. In the meantime, the Ukraine is in full-blown collapse - all five glorious stages of it - setting the stage for a Ukrainian Nightmare Before Christmas, or shortly after.

The world didn’t completely fall apart in 2015, but it is undeniable that an immense amount of damage was done to the U.S. economy. So don’t be fooled by all the happy talk coming from Barack Obama and the mainstream media.  When you look at the cold, hard numbers, they tell a completely different story.  The following are 58 facts about the U.S. economy from 2015 that are almost too crazy to believe...

Every year, Pew Research Center looks back at the most memorable facts that illustrate important trends shaping our world. From faltering faith in government to the decline of Christians in America and from increased racial tensions to the shrinking American middle-class, here are some of our most striking findings of 2015.

The Fed will never succeed in its attempt to manage inflation and unemployment by varying interest rates. This is because it and its economists do not accept the relationship between, on one side, the money it creates and the bank credit its commercial banks issue out of thin air, and on the other the disruption unsound money causes in the economy. This has been going on since the Fed was created, which makes the question as to whether the Fed was right to raise interest rates recently irrelevant.

According to WSJ, "the Obama administration pursued secret communications with elements of Syria’s regime over several years in a failed attempt to limit violence and get President Bashar al-Assad to relinquish power, according to U.S. and Arab officials. Early on, the U.S. looked for cracks in the regime it could exploit to encourage a military coup, but found few.”

Rather, economic collapse is the greatest weapon at the disposal of globalists. National panic, riots, looting, starvation, magnified crime: All of these things result in mass die-offs and desperation. Desperation leads to calls for "strong leadership", and strong leadership usually results in totalitarianism. It might seem sensationalist to tie all of these possible outcomes to the Fed rate hike decision, but give it a little time. Those who make accusations of sensationalism and “fear mongering” today will be asserting tomorrow that such developments were “easily predictable.”