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

"The worldwide collection of phone calls, emails, text messages and our total loss of privacy is all about taxes – NOT terrorism. With all this power, and the demand that encryption be outlawed, none of this surveillance has stopped one terrorist act... Let’s knock off the bullshit and stop the Stasi tactic of building files on everyone. Focus on just the targets to protect society sand we just might stop something like this if we tried."

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.

Greenspan’s phony disinflation success led to the Fed’s embrace of fully mobilized and massively intrusive monetary policy in the guise of the Great Moderation and the wealth effects theory of financial asset levitation. In due course, Greenspan’s self-aggrandizing but purely experimental forays of massive central bank intrusion in the financial markets were supplanted by the hard-core Keynesian model of Bernanke and Yellen. Alas, they operated under the grand illusion that a domestic wage and price spiral would tell them when the domestic GDP bathtub was filled to the full employment brim, and therefore when to lift their foot from the monetary accelerator. It never happened, and they never did. The era of Lite Touch monetary policy was by now ancient history.

"Do not intervene yourself.."

The massacre that occurred in Paris on Friday night has made the US more resolute than ever about cracking down on terror. Need proof? Just ask John Kerry, who has developed a "draft plan" for Syria that will have everything all better in the short span of two years.

While the world was following the tragic events unfolding on Friday night in France where hundreds of innocent civilians were killed or injured, an important economic development took place at the IMF, whose staff and head Christine Lagarde, officially greenlighted the acceptance of China's currency - the Renminbi, or Yuan - into the IMF's foreign exchange basket, also known as the Special Drawing Rights. Here are the initial early responses by various Wall Street analysts.