Saudi Arabia

While the White House spied on Frau Merkel and Obamacare developed into a slow-moving train wreck, while Syria was saved from all-out war by the Russian bell and the Republicrats fought bitterly about the debt ceiling… something monumental happened that went unnoticed by most of the globe. The US quietly surpassed Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer in the world. You read that correctly: "The jump in output from shale plays has led to the second biggest oil boom in history," stated Reuters on October 15. "U.S. output, which includes natural gas liquids and biofuels, has swelled 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd) since 2009, the fastest expansion in production over a four-year period since a surge in Saudi Arabia's output from 1970-1974." After the initial moment of awe, pragmatic readers will surely wonder: Then why isn't gasoline dirt-cheap in the US?

• U.S. spy chiefs face Congress amid spying rift with Europe (Reuters)
• Deutsche Bank income hit by €1.2bn of legal provisions (FT)
• China's second tapering attempt fails: China central bank seeks to reassure money markets after rate spike (Reuters)
• UBS Takes Action Against Staff in Foreign-Exchange Probe (WSJ)
• Saudi Arabia frees man jailed for Mohammad tweets (Reuters)
• Tax Revolts Hit Hollande as Farmers, Soccer Clubs Protest (BBG)
• German parliament to meet over U.S. spying scandal (Reuters)
• Google Nears Smartwatch Launch (WSJ)
• How to end gridlock in DC? Pork projects (Reuters)
• UBS ordered to increase capital reserves (FT)

The number one American export is U.S. dollars.  It is paper currency that is backed up by absolutely nothing, but the rest of the world has been using it to trade with one another and so there is tremendous global demand for our dollars.  The linchpin of this system is the petrodollar.  For decades, if you have wanted to buy oil virtually anywhere in the world you have had to do so with U.S. dollars.  But if one of the biggest oil exporters on the planet, such as Saudi Arabia, decided to start accepting other currencies as payment for oil, the petrodollar monopoly would disintegrate very rapidly.  For years, everyone assumed that nothing like that would happen any time soon, but now Saudi officials are warning of a "major shift" in relations with the United States.  In fact, the Saudis are so upset at the Obama administration that "all options" are reportedly "on the table".

China Has Just Surpassed the U.S. As World’s Largest Importer of Oil

America, as a nation and a culture, is now being held hostage and tortured into submission on a grand scale using economic terror by the elitist establishment which dominates BOTH major political parties.  The goal?  To push our society to conform completely with the concepts of globalization, bureaucratic micro-management, and greatly reduced living standards.  We are being conditioned to accept defeat and failure, and like children, to cry out for a parental authority to save us in our state of helplessness and fear, even if that authority was the cause of our fear from the very beginning. With so many near misses culminating so close together, it may be wise to consider what could happen in the the next three months while we wait for debt debate theater part deux.  Like a prisoner in Abu Ghraib, America is trapped, waiting for the next humiliation, the next degradation, or the next session of pain.  Are we merely being acclimated to the idea of incessant crisis?  Are we learning to become apathetic at the edge of the chasm?  Or, are we being driven to madness, mass-madness, by a concert of  elitist interrogators seeking our acquiescence? Again, the central purpose of torture is to acquire consent.  Not just extorted consent, but voluntary consent. The globalist establishment wants us to beg them to save us from the tortures they create.  If we never give them this, they will never win.

That Saudi Arabia has been furious at the US for refusing to be the monarchy's puppet Globocop, and in the last minute declining to bomb Syria following Putin's gambit in which World War III seemed a distinctly possible consequence of John Kerry's hamheaded "YouTube-substantiated" false flag campaign, is no secret. However, while the US has largely forgotten this latest foreign policy debacle and the humiliation it brought upon the Department of State, Saudi Arabia is nowhere close to forgetting. Or forgiving. And this time the anger comes from the one man who truly matters, and whom we dubbed several months ago as the puppetmaster behind the Syrian campaign: the man in charge of Saudi intelligence, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan.

Petro-dollars, the word used to describe the billions of dollars earned from the sale of oil and natural gas, have helped change the shape and future of many counties in the Middle East, usually for the better, but not always. In a few short years Petro-dollars have helped shape the Gulf states into the modern and futuristic looking cities of the future that one finds in today’s architecture in Dubai, Doha and Riyadh. But now those petro-dollars are being used to shape the political future of the region and to model specific policies in a number of countries, such as Syria, for example, where petro-dollars are hard at work today.

The Spying Has Been Going On For DECADES

Several hours earlier, news broke that a bomb had exploded on a bus in the southern Russian city of Volgograd, a few hundred kilometers from Sochi where the winter Olympics will be held. Russian investigators announced they suspect a female suicide bomber was responsible for the bombing which killed at least five people according to Interfax. Citing a source in the regional Investigative Committee office, Interfax said identity documents belonging to the suspected bomber were found near the site and that she was believed to have been the wife of an Islamist militant. Below, we show the dash cam video which caught this terrorist act in process.

Bonus: Did the Saudi Intelligence Chief and Other High-Ranking Officials Trade on Inside Information Regarding 9/11?

Once upon a time there was a conflict that was based upon ethnic origins in Darfur.

In a tragic development, the unidentified man who set himself on fire on the National Mall at about 4:30 p.m. on Friday in between the Air and Space Museum and the National Gallery, and who sustained burns to 80% of his body, has died. AP reports: "A District of Columbia police spokesman says a man who set himself on fire on the National Mall has died his injuries. Officer Araz Alali says the man died Friday night at a hospital where he had been airlifted. He says the man was so badly burned that he will need to be through DNA and dental records. The man poured a can of gasoline on himself in the center portion of the mall Friday afternoon. He then set himself on fire, with passing joggers taking off their shirts to help douse the flames." As AP adds, Police are investigating the man's possible motives for doing so. They will hardly find any, as the last thing the Obama administration needs right now is to start explaining why D.C. has become ground zero for America's own Arab Spring. Especially, if in a country in which fomenting class and social hatred once again boils down to racial characteristics.

The US government is shut down, which means only essential spending is permitted. So what does the US government, or rather its Central Intelligence Agency decide to spend precious, mission-critical taxpayer money on? Why arming the Qatari-supported Al-Qaeda "rebels" in Syria of course. WaPo reports that the CIA is expanding a clandestine effort to train opposition fighters in Syria amid concern that moderate, U.S.-backed militias are rapidly losing ground in the country’s civil war, U.S. officials said.... “It’s basic infantry training,” the former U.S. intelligence official said. “How to have some discipline hitting a target, how to reload a magazine, how to clear a room. They’re not marching. They’re learning basic infantry procedures." So let's get this straight: 800,000 non-essential workers are furloughed, but the CIA, in its infinite wisdom, is now, when the government is shut down, doubling down on spending to make sure Al-Qaeda insurgents have even more lethal training (for that inevitable moment when they turn on their sponsor as they tend to do), and even better weapons?

Back in August, just after the false flag chemical weapon attack in Syria, we showed that despite all the posturing by the Obama administration (and, of course, France's belligerent, socialist leader Francois Hollande), the nation behind the entire Syrian campaign was not one of the "democratic", Western nations but none other than close neighbor Saudi Arabia, and the brain orchestrating every move of the western puppets was one Bandar bin Sultan, the nation's influential intelligence chief. We also explained the plethora of geopolitical and mostly energy-related issues that Saudi and Qatar had at stake, which they were eager to launch a regional war over, just to promote their particular set of selfish interests. A month later, in clear confirmation that this was precisely the case, the WSJ reported that the recent overtures by Obama, brilliantly checkmated by Putin, to push for a peaceful resolution with not only Syria, but suddenly Iran as well, has managed to infuriate Saudi Arabia: traditionally one of the US' closest allies in the region and the key source of crude oil to the western world.

Being bullish on the market in the short term is fine... The expansion of the Fed's balance sheet will continue to push stocks higher as long as no other crisis presents itself. However, the problem is that a crisis, which is 'always' unexpected, inevitably will trigger a reversion back to the fundamentals. The market will eventually correct as it always does - it is part of the market cycle. The reality is that the stock market is extremely vulnerable to a sharp correction. Currently, complacency is near record levels and no one sees a severe market retracement as a possibility. The common belief is that there is 'no bubble' in assets and the Federal Reserve has everything under control.