New Normal

As of November, oil and gas companies employed 543,000 people across the U.S., a number that’s more than doubled from a decade ago, but as Bloomberg reports, thousands of energy industry workers are now getting their pink slips as crude prices have plunged to less than $50 a barrel. "For the oil and gas industry, it’s scary," explains one worker, adding "I was blind to the ups and downs associated with the industry." Can we blame him, watching business media and one could be forgiven for believing this plunge is "unambiguously awesome." As the following chilling chart shows, however, it is not...

Thing is, that whole line about how lower oil prices were going to be a boost for our economies was ignorant from the start. And there’s still plenty people believing just that. That may explain those EU stock exchange gains. That sort of thing all comes from people who don’t understand to what extent oil is pivotal to our societies. We’re not in 2008 anymore, when an oil price drop actually helped us crawl out of a tight spot. We’re $50 trillion down the road, and there won’t be another $50 trillion, or another road. For all intents and purposes, we are the center today, and we cannot hold this way.

The circle of life in today's new normal...

The structure of history is held together by two essential and distinct kinds of links, two moments in time to which no one is immune: moments of epiphany, and moments of catastrophe. Sometimes, both elements intermingle at the birth of a singular epoch. Men often awaken to understanding in the midst of great crisis; and, invariably, great crises can erupt when men awaken. These are the moments when social gravity vanishes, when the kinetic glue of normalcy melts away, and we begin to see the true foundations of our world, if a foundation exists at all. That time is now...

No reason to sell.  No reason to buy.  That about sums it up.  Unfortunately, that is about as optimistic a scenario as we can come up with, supported by equally optimistic growth expectations. In reality, the market has no support.  We can only hope that it will not crash at the first sign of trouble. There are always good reasons to own a home, a place to raise a family. However, home ownership via extremely leveraged financing carries enormous and unprecedented risk. We think many potential buyers recognize the risk and are correctly staying out of the market. The new normal in real estate terms is unlikely to be what the market is hoping for.

Something stunning and unexpected took place in the third quarter: Citigroup, or rather its FDIC-insured Citibank National Association entity, just surpassed JPM and is now the biggest single holder of total derivatives in the US. Furthermore, as the charts below show, while every other bank was derisking its balance sheet, Citi not only increased its total derivative holdings by $1 trillion in Q2, but by a whopping, and perhaps even record, $9 trillion in the just concluded third quarter to $70.2 trillion!

If technology requires a complex society to build and maintain it, and our dreams and hopes are pinned on even more complex and useful technology in the future, but net energy from new oil plays is shrinking, then it might not be wise to pin all our hopes on technology. Perhaps there should be some other plans in the works too.

For just the 5th time since 1950, the S&P 500 dropped at least 1% on the last trading day of the year... and then continued that weakness on the first day of the current trading year. So what happened next?

After years of being blocked by Democratic leader Harry Reid, The Washington Times reports, the Senate will finally get a chance next year to vote on legislation to force a broad audit of the Federal Reserve's decision-making. Ron Paul's flagship legislative efforts have been picked up by his son and now has the backing of the leader of the new Republican majority, Sen. Mitch McConnell, whose office says the legislation will earn a floor vote. While the bill is not a sure thing, it appears to have The Fed worried as Reuters reports, Yellen and other Fed officials are lobbying Capitol Hill to drop the audit push.

The sixth anniversary of Zero Hedge is just around the corner, and so, for the sixth year in a row we continue our tradition of summarizing what you, our readers, found to be the most relevant, exciting, and actionable news of the year, determined by the number of page views. Those eager for a brief stroll down memory lane of prior years can do so at their leisure, by going back in time to our top articles of 2009,2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. For everyone else, without further ado, these are the articles that readers found to be the most popular posts of the past 365 days.

A Florida man calls 9-1-1...

Earlier today, Saudi Arabia's stock market fell sharply with the Tadawul All Share Index plunging following a Saudi state TV report that King Abdullah had been admitted to hospital for tests. As shown in the chart report, the index tumbled as much as 6% lower in the minutes after the Saudi Press Agency report which quoted a brief royal court statement. But while the ill king of the King, aged 90, is hardly news to the discounting stock market, a few more nuanced interpertation of not just what happens if and when the King passes away but what Saudi succession looks like, is much more relevant for oil - especially now that Saudi Arabia has unilaterally decided to tear apart OPEC in its push to put US shale producers out of business.

It is becoming increasingly clear that just as the crude oil market is set for some violent times ahead as producers lock into the defection phase of the Prisoner's Dilemma and flood the market with supply in an attempt to crush the weakest competition, so the gold market is set for many upheavals, the first of which, however, may be what Goldcorp defined in a recent presentation slideshow as Peak Gold.

2014... same as 2013 - stocks up, economic growth down!