None

If the shade of Adam Smith were to reappear today, he would be equally disturbed by the failure of the Bowles-Simpson commission to address the issue of war debts dealt.

Next time you swing by the White House, remember to tell your now desperately insecure president that he has your support, or else we may get another temper tantrum like the one yesterday. It appears that now none other than the White House has the (in)security issues of a 14 year old girl. In what has to be the epitome of a surreal joke, the official White House website has released a list of actual individuals and institutions (among these, shockingly, the New York Times, Market Watch, Harvard and, no shit, Bank of America) who have voiced their "statements of support on the framework agreement on middle class tax cuts and unemployment insurance." Oddly, nowhere in this list is even a passing mention of the Zero Hedge reminder that just the tax cut extension portion of the deal is likely to boost the deficit, and thus the US funding need, by $5 trillon over the next decade. In other news, the market is up because consumer confidence is higher... and consumer confidence is higher because the market is up. The adventures of Alice through the looking glass have nothing on America's blind meanderings through the depression zone.

“McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.”--Joe McCarthy

This albatross is going to weigh on us in 2011.

Price stability is the new fad among Fed critics who understandably want to see its mandate reduced. The problem is that even if the Fed could engineer price stability, this would be very economically damaging. Prices gyrate with regularity, and their movements tell producers what we want more and less of. If the Fed is to be given any mandate it should be one in favor of dollar-price stability. Nothing more than that.

The American Dream is dead, and we are responsible. Yes, I know what you are thinking. How can I possible say this when corrupt politicians and even more corrupt bankers are responsible for killing the American Dream? Of course I acknowledge this fact, but without our willing, gleefully ignorant participation in their “Death Race to the Bottom 2014” game, the death of the American Dream would not be possible.

British pension funds will be prevented from investing in risky assets, including stocks, by the Pensions Regulator under plans to stop weaker companies with large pension shortfalls from making huge bets.

In this week's Straight Talk episode, Chris Martenon interviews Charles Hugh Smith, both very insightful individuals who have repeatedly appeared on the pages of Zero Hedge with unique and always original perspectives. Of all issues that dominate CHS' outlook on the economy, society and politics, the top two items that keep Smith up at night are "demographics and Peak Oil...which cannot be massaged away by policy tweaks or financial engineering." Much more in the enclosed interview.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not 100% sure about anything. The older I get, the less sure I am about everything. I question things that I was sure were true when I was 25 years old. I’m not sure I’ll wake up in the morning. I’m not sure I’ll survive my commute to work. That is why I was flabbergasted last night as I watched Scott Pelley interview Ben Bernanke on 60 Minutes. As a side note, boy this show has gone downhill. In the old days of real journalism, Mike Wallace would have scorched Ben Bernanke, pointing out his phenomenal ability to be wrong or clueless on every financial issue the country has faced in the last 10 years. Today, Pelley underhands softball questions to Bernanke and never challenges him. It was a pathetic display of journalism. Below is the dialogue that made me almost fall off my chair...

As silver attempts to break $30/oz yet again after the LBMA woke up and rejected an earlier attempt to take out the critical barrier, it is appropriate to present the most recent interview with Eric Sprott (by the Globe and Mail): the man who one of few, and very much against the conventional wisdom grain, called the move in precious metals many years ago, and so far, has been spot on. The summary on why the much maligned PM bubble is not even close yet: "I think gold is the reserve currency today. There is not a currency in the world that it hasn’t appreciated against by at least 300 per cent. And it has beaten every stock market. You can’t even rent a safety deposit box in Germany because they are all full of gold and silver … I am pretty convinced that gold will go a lot higher because it is under-owned as only 1 per cent of people’s money is in it. It could go to $2,000 an ounce. I could imagine it at $5,000. I am not giving a time frame on that, but I could certainly see that happening. But the real story now is silver." And on silver: "Gold has traded at a ratio of 16-to-1 to silver in terms of price, but today it trades in the range of 50 to 1. I think the gold-to-silver ratio is going to go back to 16 to 1 given the passage of time, say three to five years. And I bet you that silver overshoots. The gold-to-silver ratio may even get down to 10 to 1. I believe that the price of silver has been suppressed."

Not even close.

Just released - apology #3 from Jan Hatzius on his ill-timed "golden age" call. We expect many more. We almost feel sorry for the German strategist and the replacement of FRBNY's Bill Dudley. "Nice timing on our GDP forecast upgrade! The November employment report was a disappointment, and there weren’t a lot of redeeming features buried underneath the headlines. Private sector payroll growth fell back to +50k, the slowest pace since January 2010. The household survey was also weak, with a rise in the unemployment rate to 9.82% and a drop in the employment/population ratio to 58.18%, just a hair above the cycle low seen in December 2009. The jobs report followed higher initial jobless claims on Thursday and a soft manufacturing ISM survey on Wednesday."

Earlier today, record interest in what could be Julian Assange's last live chat crashed the Guardian's entire website (which is the 16th top ranked site in Britain on a regular day getting tens of millions of hits). To be sure, the Guardian's exhaustive coverage of Assange's travails have paid off in droves, and as the Alexa chart below shows, the site's rank has surged as ad revenues have exploded. We hope the Guardian is keeping at least some of the proceeds in escrow for the soon to be created "Free Julian" fund. And while a boredom-intolerant world awaits news of the Wikileaks creator's arrest, below is a complete transcript of what could be his last live interview before captivity.

Even as the CFTC is doing its best to postpone indefinitely (and hopefully infinitely) a review of limit speculative positions held by commodity traders (read JPM), commissioner Bart Chilton, who really should shut up if he knows what is good for him, told the CFTC to instead act quickly and actually do something right for investor protection for once (not necessarily in those words). From Reuters: "The regulator, which has a mid-January deadline, has been pushing back
the date to propose new speculative limits in energy and metals markets,
and so far has not given a time for when it will be introduced. This proposal should be discussed on December 9th at the commission's
next meeting; a proposal should be put out for public comment as soon as
possible; and we should commit to meeting the statutory deadline," said
Bart Chilton, a CFTC commissioner. "We can always find excuses, justifications, or pretexts for inaction --
this rule is too important to let any of those get in the way of
fulfilling our statutory responsibilities, and keeping our promise." The problem is that none of "those" are standing in the way of fulfilling statutory responsibilities: there are only two things that are standing in the way, and they are called Jamie Dimon and Blythe Masters.

Yes, I know the banks are hedged, and that means the are all safe right. We can just ask Ambac, MBIA, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns investors - to start with...