Brazil

"Are there other people out there with enough equipment? Probably. But in terms of the operational side of things, Aggreko are pretty good at this."

"It is time once again to seek the safety of the sidelines. This is not the time to be aggressively bullish of equities but rather this is the time for… as we say here in the South… “hunkering down,” for getting smaller, for curtailing exposure."

“They need to show they’re selling quickly to calm markets and stop the free fall of their shares. For that to happen they need to accept the price buyers want to pay.”

This is where the Fed. now finds itself. Here they were. Just holding policy lines doing what they in their Ivory Tower contemplated and the so-called “smart crowd” insisted they do. And now the saying of “Between a rock and a hard place” might be an understatement. The world sits atop a tinderbox fueled by monetary policies that created them and awaits a match that could set it off in a blaze of who knows what. All in short order. Unless they don’t do anything except try their best Draghi impersonation and declare, “They too are once again at the ready to do what ever it takes!” Except – just not now.

"Mission Accomplished?" Amid failure after failure for President Obama's 'legacy' policies, Americans can rest assured that the "historic" signing of today's climate accord will be spun in its most positive, "see, I saved the world from its greatest threat" awesomeness, despite, as we detailed earlier, the utter farce of it all.

"What’s it like playing chess with Obama?" asks a top aid of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Putin replies, "It's like playing chess with a pigeon. First it knocks over all the pieces, then it shits on the board, and finally it struts around like it won."

The chart below crystalizes why the Fed is stranded in a monetary no man’s land. By the time of next week’s meeting the federal funds rate will have been pinned at about 10 bps, or effectively zero, for 84 straight months. After one pretension, delusion, head fake and forecasting error after another, the denizens of the Eccles Building have painted themselves into the most dangerous monetary corner in history. They have left themselves no alternative except to provoke a riot in the casino - the very outcome that has filled them with fear and dread all these years.

"2015 was like commuting by rollercoaster. There were heart-stopping drops, there were nearly vertical ascents, and when it was all over you got off just about where you started and it cost you money."

If we have a saviour, it is the person in the mirror. If we are to be saved, we alone must do the research, make the plans, vote with our feet and establish our own liberty.

After yesterday's rollercoaster session in both the S&P and in oil, where initially stocks soared alongside oil, only to promptly tumble as stops were taken out and as the refiners' inventory strategy was exposed after the DOE's latest weekly numbers were released, it has been a quieter session so far, though maybe not for China where stocks jumped at the open only to fizzle and close at the lows in what appears to be ever less intervention by the market manipulating "National Team."

People understand nothing lasts forever. The bottom does not last forever. You want to buy low and sell high. Not only are we skipping along the lows, perhaps we can go lower but there is true value  here - in all aspects - not only in the gold and silver but also in the natural resource sector. as a whole with bargains all over the place.

Following a roudy session in Congress that nearly dissolved into "chaos," the Brazilian Supreme Court suspended impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff until December 16. Meanwhile, annual inflation rose to 10.5% in November, the highest in 12 years as the country's stagflationary nightmare continues unabated.

“I’ve always known about your and your people’s complete lack of trust in me and the PMDB. A lack of trust that is incompatible with what we’ve done to maintain personal and partisan support for your government.”