The most important story of 2015 had to have been the junk bond reversal. It is not your typical market behavior; not at all the “wall of worry” that represents healthy skepticism and functional fundamental discounting but rather a “get the hell out of Dodge” and stay out. Not transitory at all, then, rather a paradigm shift that isn’t yet even close to a new steady state. Welcome to 2016.

Now that the gold-trading company at the nexus of what may have been the world's biggest gold smuggling ring in history has imploded seemingly overnight, vaporizing countless tons of physical gold and unknown amounts of client cash, even more questions remain.

For those wondering what comes to mind for the average Chinese web surfer with regard to nations in Europe, we present the following map from Foreign Policy who “plotted the most common Chinese-language Baidu query for each European nation.” Highlights include "likes to fight" for Russia, "why doesn't it annex Portugal" for Spain, and "beautiful women" for Ukraine.

The president has directed administration officials to explore any steps he could take on guns without lawmakers’ help, and he said in his weekly address that he would sit down with Ms. Lynch on Monday “to discuss our options.” Once he has Lynch's "blessing", the WSJ adds that Obama "could lay out multiple executive actions as soon as next week, and administration officials have confirmed that recommendations for the president are nearing completion."

Faith! Hope? Then Clarity...

The seventh anniversary of Zero Hedge is just around the corner, and so, for the seventh year in a row we continue our tradition of summarizing what our readers found to be the most relevant, exciting, and actionable news of the year, determined by the number of page views. We bring you the articles that you, dear reader, found to be the most interesting in the past 365 days.

The Norwegian owner of a Tesla Model S found an unexpected f(i)ringe benefit during a cold Friday afternoon when shortly after he had parked his luxury electric car at a supercharging station in Gjerstad, and left, he realized the car could serve as a very quick and efficient, if quite toxic, source of heating for the cold Scandinavian country, when the Model S spontaneously burst into flames.