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Watching Hilary Clinton debate Bernie Sanders- or like lastnight, Jeb Bush against Donald Trump - doesn’t strike us as too different from when Hulk Hogan faced off against Andre the Giant in Wrestlemania. In fact, it’s essentially the same with elections today, it's "political entertainment." It’s all fake. It’s sound bites, jabs and jibes, and pointless banter completely devoid of any real substance. But the truth is, none of it really matters, the United States objectively speaking is far past the point of no return.

"I have a problem with Berkshire’s ownership of Coke,” Ackman told an audience of about 200 people. “Coca-Cola has probably done more to create obesity, diabetes on a global basis than any other company in the world. "You have some of the best marketing in the world and a lot of happy skinny people drinking it in the advertising."

In what sounds like the plot of a McCarthy-era propaganda spy novel, the Socialists and Communists have overthrown the government in Portugal. That means it's time for the troika to start pushing back against the undesirables by threatening the country with financial ruin. Just call it "tough love." 

Ruane Cunniff & Goldfarb, the investment firm that runs the Sequoia Fund, was Valeant’s largest shareholder as of June 30, with VRX shares growing to 29% of Sequoia’s portfolio at midyear. The latest outflow is a continuation of previous redemptions: "in the first 10 months of 2015, Sequoia Fund’s outflows totaled about $213 million, Bloomberg data show, after investors withdrew more than $500 million in 2014."

Empires, like adolescents, think they’ll live forever. In geopolitics, as in biology, expiration dates are never visible. When death comes, it’s always a shock. "At the beginning of the great unraveling, in 2015, I was still a young man. Like everyone else, I didn’t see this coming. Today, in 2050, fewer and fewer people can recall what it was like to live among those leviathans... Thirty-five years and endless catastrophes later on a poorer, bleaker, less hospitable planet, it’s clear that we just weren’t paying sufficient attention. Had we been listening, we would have heard the termites. There, in the basement of our common home, they were eating the very foundations out from under us. Suddenly, before we knew quite what was happening, all that was solid had melted into air."

There is little evidence currently that the rally over the last couple of months has done much to reverse the more "bearish" market signals that currently exist. Furthermore, as noted by Jochen Schmidt, the current market action may be more indicative of market topping process. Not unlike previous market topping action, the markets could indeed even register "new highs," as witnessed in both 2000 and 2007 before the major market correction begins. This is typically how "bull markets" end by providing false signals and sucking in the last of those willing to "buy the top." The devastation comes soon after.

As Strategas notes "any way we look at it, market breadth remains narrow," but, as Dana Lyon's details, everyone's favorite high-beta squeeze index - Nasdaq - is perhaps the most troubling. Since the initial spike off the September lows, rally participation among all stocks has been lackluster; the Nasdaq provides us with more evidence of this... In fact, over the past month, the cumulative number of daily advancing stocks minus declining stocks on the Nasdaq is actually negative.

JS Kim Issues Critical Warning About Newly Introduced Global Banking "Gold Programs". Could Bankers Be Duping Us into Yet Another One of Their Reverse Alchemy Schemes?

To compare someone like Bernie Sanders to bloodthirsty monsters like Stalin and Pol Pot is too ludicrous for words. I've heard of slippery slopes before, but good lord, this guy must be totally off his rocker

"...middle-aged whites have lost the narrative of their lives. ... while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I’m not sure whether they’re enough to cure existential despair."

With crude stocks moving up solidly despite inventories being still almost one-third above the “cycle” trend from 2009 through 2014, the economics of that behavior suggest the opposite of what the FOMC would like to project. And that would seem to bridge the eurodollar curve’s front and back ends, aligning it with commodities more generally. In that view, eurodollar futures are suggesting exactly what they have been for almost a year and a half – that the Fed might or might not act, but if they do it won’t alter the economic course but only wield the potential to make a bad (and growing more so) physical and general economy situation that much worse.

“Normally, policemen are not allowed on the tarmac. Recently, they’re being asked to spend nights beneath jets.”

Forget anything you might read about “brutal dictators” that need to go or the importance of “democracy” to the region. That's dumbed-down pablum for the masses and has literally nothing to do with the motivations of the (clinically insane) external power brokers actually driving the events on the ground and crafting the narrative that is faithfully scribed and re-told by the media. In fact, disturbingly often, the scribed narrative is exactly opposite of the truth.

The US military-intelligence complex is engaged in systematic preparations for World War III. As far as the Pentagon is concerned, a military conflict with China and/or Russia is inevitable, and this prospect has become the driving force of its tactical and strategic planning. Three congressional hearings Tuesday demonstrated this reality. Contrary to the media portrayal of Washington as deeply divided between parties with intransigently opposed political outlooks, there was bipartisan agreement on this most fundamental of issues, the preparation of a new imperialist world war.