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Liquidity in the junk (and all other markets) is evaporating, and according to Citi the spread between an illiquid and liquid junk bond portfolio just hit 100 bps, the most in the history of the series. Meanwhile according to Mohamed El-Erian "The market is comfortable that whenever we hit a hiccup, the Fed is going to come back in," he said. "It's very deeply embedded that central banks are our best friends forever."

"From July through October, hedge fund favorite stocks posted their worst relative returns outside of 2008."

“George W. Bush may think that a war against Iraq is the solution to our problems, but the reality is, it will only serve to create far more,” read a 2003 article on The Onion a week after then-President George Bush launched the Iraq War. While a wide variety of organizations and individuals also rebuked that invasion, the satirical newspaper offered one of the most accurate assessments to date. So accurate, in fact, it all but predicted the rise of the Islamic State.

Instead of Listening to Idiots Talking Their Book ... Let's Fact-Check the Myths

We wonder how long until someone finally asks the all important question regarding the Islamic State: who is the commodity trader breaching every known law of funding terrorism when buying ISIS crude, almost certainly with the tacit approval by various "western alliance" governments, and why is it that these governments have allowed said middleman to continue funding ISIS for as long as it has?

Today we got confirmation that the spinning plates of the Affordable Care Act are finally falling down, when none other than the U.S.’s biggest health insurer, UnitedHealth, cut its 2015 earnings forecast with a warning that it was considering pulling out of Obamacare, just one month after saying it would expand its presence in the program. 

The Fed was out in force yesterday peddling some pretty heavy-duty malarkey about the up-coming rate liftoff at the December meeting..."If we begin to raise interest rates, that’s a good thing." That’s not a bad thing." Goldman is putting out the final mullet call for this Bubble Cycle because it knows that this bull is dying; that insiders still have massive amounts of stock winnings to unload; and that the clock is fast running out. The expiring clock is evident in the S&P 500’s one-year round trip to nowhere. Despite the fact that the Fed has ponied-up a stick save at every single meeting this year, the market’s 27 separate efforts to rally have all failed for the simple reason that the jig is up.

“Apparently, it’s a kind of a ‘honey is sweet, but the bee stings’ situation: they want IS to weaken Assad as soon as possible to make him leave somehow, but at the same time they don’t want to overly strengthen IS, which may then seize power."

One week after the gold scheme's official launch, we take a look at how has it has done so far. In one word, so far the "gold monetization" plan has been a disaster with a laughable 30 kilograms in gold tendered by the people from physical into "government-backed" form.

Overnight none other than the German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said that the "Syrian passport found next to a suicide bomber in the Paris terror attacks may have been planted." “There are indications that this was a planted lead, but it still can’t be ruled out that this was indeed an IS terrorist posing as a refugee,” he told reporters in Berlin on Tuesday, referring to Islamic State, which France blames for organizing the violence.

Is the US about to go Icelandic (or Chinese) on Wall Street executives for their role in packaging bad mortgages in the lead up to the financial crisis? Probably not, but at least we can pretend...

How can so much gold be supplied to China without someone buying it and thus being genuine demand? It cannot. Chinese gold demand as disclosed by the World Gold Council (WGC) is fallacious. We were already missing 2,500 tonnes from the WGC numbers and now we have to add another 604 tonnes...

First it was Texas. Then five other states - Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, and Michigan - followed in refusing to admit any Syrian refugees. It has since became an avalanche, and at last check, at least 27 states - represented by more than half the nation's governors - say they oppose letting Syrian refugees into their states.

Why do they still refuse to believe in the concept of blowback? Is it because the explanation that, “they hate us because we are free,” makes it easier to escalate abroad and crack down at home? It may not be popular to say this as emotions run high and calls ring out for more bombing in the Middle East, but there is another way to address the problem. There is an alternative to using more military intervention to address a problem that was caused by military intervention in the first place.

We're not persuaded that world opinion will ever “make sense” of the Paris attacks. The non-linear rules the day. One thing seems assured: hard-line governments are coming soon. Politically, the West had boundary problems that go way beyond the question of national borders to the core psychology of modern liberalism. When is enough of anything enough? And then, what are you really willing to do about it? The answer lately among the Western societies is to do little and do it slowly. The behavior of college administrators and faculties in the USA these days is emblematic of this cowardly dithering.