Wall Street Journal

The government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is investigating a report that the U.S. government has been spying on executives of the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA, over the past decade. “The oil industry is the backbone of the Venezuelan economy,” Maduro said on state television. “The U.S. empire for a long time … has intended to sabotage [Venezuela’s] oil industry and defeat the [Caracas] government in order to steal the oil.”

The 'Great Recession' was evidently so bad for the economy that it stopped the net influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico. For the first time since the 1940s, more Mexicans have been leaving the U.S. to return home than arriving, a reversal that brings down the curtain on the largest immigration wave in modern American history. As WSJ reports, the Pew Research Center figures released Thursday suggest that the surge in legal and illegal Mexican immigration that helped transform America - and remains a contentious issue on the presidential campaign trail - may have peaked for good.

Americans have taken on more revolving debt (credit cards basically) since March than they did the previous three years combined. Economists are, as you would expect, nearly ecstatic over the impoverishment. To them, it signals the final capitulation of consumers to that which Janet Yellen has been professing since her term began. But there is a huge problem with that view; if consumers are borrowing, what are they doing with the balances? Instead, this discontinuity can only be consistent where consumers are completely out of options. If there are noticeably fewer goods being shipped here and within here, the US, and borrowing has just exploded at the same exact time then it is rather easy to conclude far more of full recession than recovery.

Obamaworld is gone. We live again in an us-versus-them country in an us-versus-them world. And we shall likely never know another.

History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear.

From both a political and economic perspective, the terrorists could hardly have chosen a more vulnerable moment to strike, with Europe wearied by years of crisis, paralysed by political indecision and shipwrecked by incompetent policy.

If the U.S. economy really is in “great shape”, then why do all of the numbers keep telling us that we are in a recession? In 2008, stocks didn’t crash until well after the U.S. economy as a whole started crashing, and the same thing is apparently happening this time around as well.

If having to slash valuations by 30% from the latest private financing round was not bad enough, Square's IPO just priced notably below the expected (already lowered) range of $11-13 (and even further below the $15.46 at which it raised private money last year):

*SQUARE SAID TO PRICE 27M IPO SHARES AT $9 EACH, REUTERS REPORTS

So from a private valuation around $6 billion to this, and along with Fidelity marking down its SnapChat valuation, it appears that without another massacre in a major city, risk appetite for these paper-behemoths may have gone the way of the mythical unicorn itself.

"...the only thing worse than a market with collapsing valuations is a market with no valuations and no liquidity. If stock in a company is worth what somebody will pay for it, what is the stock of a company worth when there is no place to sell it?"

Having recently shown The Fed to go 6 for 6 in a day of FedSpeak failures to spark animal spirits, it appears this is actually not so unusual for some members of The Fed. As WSJ found, when it comes to watching the Federal Reserve, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on Atlanta and San Francisco but for 9 of the policy-makers, economists rank their 'FedSpeak' as less than useful... with soon-to-be-replaced Kockerlakota the least useful Fed speaker of all...

• Belgian Police 'Arrest' Public Enemy No.1 (Sky News)
• France Widens Crackdown at Home as Bombs Rain on Islamic State (BBG)
• Putin Goes From G-20 Pariah to Player at Obama Turkey Talk (BBG)
• Paris Attacks: 150 Raids as France Goes to 'War With Terrorism' (NBC)
• 'Rocket Launcher Found' In French Police Raids (Sky)
• Geopolitical worries lift oil after Paris attacks, but glut weighs (Reuters)
• Japan's economy falls back into recession again (BBC)

For the latest bit of evidence that global trade is indeed in free fall, look no further than the container terminals at the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Calif. and around New York harbor which handle more than 50% of seaborne freight coming into the US. As it turns out, “peak” season turned out to be anything but.

U.S. stock investors may be complacent regarding the ability of the stock market to withstand higher interest rates. Their confidence may come from the fact that, historically, markets have not peaked until 12-24 months after the Fed begins to tighten. This assumes the tightening cycle begins with the first official rate hike. But if it really began with the increase in the Shadow Rate, then a December rate hike will already be 19 months into the tightening cycle! Plus, given how overvalued stocks may currently be, and the amount of corporate debt accumulated to finance share buybacks, this bull market may be far more vulnerable than most to higher interest rates.

Should the Fed not hike rates on December 16, then we will know with certainty that over 90% of economists are unable to accurately forecast a simple yes/no event, which is due to take place in just over a month

The headline-making celebrations of the mind-blowing numbers associated with China's Singles-Day sales drove investors to buy BABA ahead of the open in excited 'everything is awesome' anticipation. However, between 'sell the news' profit-takers, weak China macro, and a WSJ story confirming our recent fears on counterfeit goods, BABA is now down over 4% on the day, back below the 200-day moving average.