"There have been complaints of sexual harassment and chatting-up going on in this swimming pool ... by groups of young men, and this has prompted some women to leave (the premises). This led to my decision that adult males from our asylum shelters may not enter the swimming pool until further notice."

“Fed Chair Janet Yellen will be forced to either acknowledge labor market tightening as reason to continue with the four-hike schedule for 2016 or risk her credibility, belittle job market stability and sound a warning about the risks of lower oil prices and cheap gasoline (sacrilege to regular Americans) by slowing the hiking pace after a single 0.25 percent increase last month. If she gets it wrong, things could get ugly fast."

The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the fourth quarter of 2015 is 0.6 percent on January 15, down from 0.8 percent on January 8. The forecast for fourth quarter real consumer spending growth fell from 2.0 percent to 1.7 percent after this morning's retail sales report from the U.S. Census Bureau and the industrial production release from the Federal Reserve.

(3)01k?

"Today we feast, for tomorrow we die..."

What goes up, comes down considerably faster...

"Stay out of the bathroom."

America's favorite "fast casual" darling is set to hold a kind of ad hoc “try not to poison anyone” meeting on February 8, when all stores will close “for a few hours” so that management can “discuss some of the changes [its] making to enhance food safety, to talk about the restaurant’s role in all of that and to answer questions from employees.”

There’s more than a whiff of 2008 in the air. The sources of systemic financial sector risk are different this time (they always are), but China and the global industrial/commodity complex are even larger tectonic plates than the US housing market, and their shifts are no less destructive. There’s also more than a whiff of 1938 in the air, as we have a Fed that is apparently hell-bent on raising rates even as a Category 5 deflationary hurricane heads our way, even as the yield curve continues to flatten.

At the start of September last year, as stocks began to ramp aggressively off the Black Monday crash lows, we unveiled a rather discomforting "decoupling" that suggested strongly "don't believe the hype." Four months later, and able to remain strongly convicted of the trade, the inverse VIX ETF (XIV) and the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) have recoupled back at the lows from August 24th. We await the recoupling of equity exuberance to credit curmudgeon-ness...

Earlier today, Art Cashin summarized most (very desperate) traders' thoughts when he said that as a result of today's market crash, "the Fed will try anything" to prop up the wealth effect it had so carefully engineered with seven years of central planning in the aftermath of the financial crisis.  Yet one person who is far less sanguine abou the latest in a long series of central bank bailouts of the stock market is Macro-Allocation's Paul Brodsky, who believes that instead of the Fed Put, the time of the Fed Call has come.

Slumping crude prices are weighing heavily on Norway's economy as the government looks to its $830 billion sovereign wealth fund to plug budget holes and pay for fiscal stimulus. Officials hope a weaker krone can serve as a shock absorber but with Mario Draghi stuck in easing mode, that may prove to be an increasingly dubious proposition.

"Japan’s deflation didn’t begin until the mid-1990s, a half-decade after the collapse of Japanese real estate and equity prices. Furthermore, during the early years of deflation, Japanese long-run inflation expectations remained well anchored, averaging about 1½ percent as measured by consensus forecasts. So, unfortunately, a Japan-style deflation remains a relevant worst-case scenario for us going forward."

While gas rigs fell 13 last week, oil rigs dropped just 1 to 515. Crude's initial reaction was to extend losses...