Reuters

"We’re going to come down to about twice a quarter or a little more than that. That’s the right amount to make it regular but not a constant poke in the eye."

"There's no point in other countries getting together and deciding about a system of government and the head of that state. This is a dangerous innovation which no government in the world would accept being imposed on itself. The solution to Syria's problem is elections."

Update: CME DIRECT ISSUES NOW RESOLVED, EXCHANGE SAYS

CME Group's online trading platform CME Direct will be unavailable until further notice due to a technical issue, the exchange said in a member notice this morning sent at 0857ET. While volumes look largely unaffected, Reuters reports that the outage came on the first day that CME migrated many users of its EOS Trader platform over to CME Direct, and also coincided with an upgrade to CME Direct's technology, sources familiar with the matter said.

As the crackdown against Zexi was taking place, Shanghai police also arrested 3 suspects as they cracked a case of stock futures price manipulation involving over 11.3 billion yuan (US$1.8 billion), police said yesterday in a statement. According to Shanghai Daily, Yishidun, a commercial company registered in Jiangsu Province’s Zhangjiagang City in 2012, was found to use an illegal stock futures trading software to destabilize the market and profit from volatility.

Dennis Gartman, author of the institutionally well followed ‘The Gartman Letter,’ has asked questions about gold’s peculiar price action last week and raised the question as to whether there was official central bank manipulation of gold prices.

Disappointed "this time it's different" analysts point out better-than-expected China PMI, a relatively large decline Friday for U.S. rig count, and overall sentiment today as reasons why crude oil prices should not be falling, but after hitting 2 week highs Friday, with algos running stops on every swing, it appears the harsher reality of China's full storage, plunging tanker rates, an unquivering OPEC, and ongoing production levels is too much to bear for the bulls...

• Baffle with BS: German Bonds Decline Along With Peers as Draghi Cools QE Talk (BBG)
• And yet... ECB's Nowotny says low inflation forces ECB to act (Reuters)
• Stocks fall on China data, but stronger euro zone lifts gloom (Reuters)
• Global factories struggle as stimulus fails to spur (Reuters)
• Russian airline rules out technical fault, pilot error in Egypt crash (Reuters)
• Turkey returns to single-party rule in boost for Erdogan (Reuters)

In a somewhat shocking admission of its own un-omnipotence, or perhaps more of a C.Y.A. moment for the inevitable mean-reversion to reality, Reuters reports that San Francisco Fed President John Williams said Friday that low neutral interest rates are a warning sign of possible changes in the U.S. economy that the central bank does not fully understand. With Japan having been there for decades, and the rest of the developed world there for 6 years, suddenly, just weeks away from what The Fed would like the market to believe is the first rate hike in almost a decade, Williams decides now it is the time to admit the central planners might be missing a factor (and carefully demands better fiscal policy).

A few days ago we warned, confirming Goldman Sachs' earlier analysis that the world was running out of space to store crude distillate products, that China was running out of storage space for crude oil as it dramatically ramped up its Strategic Petroleum Reserve 'buy low' plan. While the brightest indicator at the time was "about 4 million barrels of crude oil stranded in two tankers off an eastern port for nearly two months," this week, the dial went to 11 on the oil-demand-fear-o-meter, as Bloomberg reports supertankers sailing to Chinese ports plunged to its lowest in 13 months, sending the daily rate for shipping crashing. The marginal demand-er of last resort just left the market.

Today we got yet another tortured admission of just how ugly Greek balance sheets are, the ECB has admitted what we knew months ago, namely that more than  half of all Greek loans are now nonperforming, and that as much as 57% of the loans made by Piraeus Bank the bank which fared worst, are at risk with the other Greek banks not much better off.

It's "boots on the ground" time in the Mid-East and predictably, the mainstream media are asking all the wrong questions. Here's what you need to know about America's plan to embed US commandos with Kurdish forces in Syria.

According to multiple reports, the Obama administration is set to send dozens of "military advisers" to Syria. They will serve in an "advise and assist" role in the effort to rout ISIS. Cutting through the obfuscation: Washington needs to figure out how to salvage its strategy in Syria - and fast. Make no mistake, this will be a disaster...

Gold is up 3.1% in October and had even larger gains in other currencies. Entering gold’s “seasonal sweet spot” in November, December, January and February.

"If the United States continues with these kinds of dangerous, provocative acts, there could well be a seriously pressing situation between frontline forces from both sides on the sea and in the air, or even a minor incident that sparks war."