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"The bottom line is that people around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures.  This applies to foreign leaders as well." - Barack Obama, January 17, 2014

"On one occasion, he told shareholders worried about the prospects of a gas well that they needed only to 'Trust Jim Bob'"...

"... On 12 December 2015, the Company was notified by the local public security bureau that the Truck was found but not the Lost Documents. As at the date of this announcement, although the possibility of finding the Lost Documents is not high, the Group has nonetheless deployed all possible resources in search of the Lost Documents."

The winners from a $5 trillion M&A bubble: Wall Street bankers will make hundreds of millions in M&A fees. The losers: hundreds of thousands of workers who are about to be laid off, pardon, "synergized."

Everyone who is convinced that the current status quo is permanent and unbreakable should consider what happened to the super-wealthy private landholders of the Western Roman Empire. When the empire's power to coerce broke down, the super-wealthy vanished into the dustbin of history. Few believed that possible in 475 AD, but history isn't a matter of belief. Believing it isn't possible doesn't stop history.

While most hedge funds will be glad to close the books on a year in which they once again dramatically underperformed a market which hugged the flatline courtesy of just a few stocks (even as most stocks posted substantial declines) and where "hedge fund hotels" such as Valeant suffered dramatic implosions, a handful of traders generated impressive returns for their investors and made billions by going against the herd.

No year is ever easy to predict, if only because if it were, that would take all the fun out of life. But still, predictions for 2016 look quite a bit easier than other years. This is because a whole bunch of irreversible things happened in 2015 that were not recognized for what they are, either intentionally or by ‘accident’. Things that will therefore now be forced to play out in 2016, when denial will no longer be an available option. Simply put, 2016 will be the year when a lot of ‘underlying wealth’ evaporates.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, put it best: “Take alarm,” he warned, “at the first experiment with liberties.” Anyone with even a casual knowledge about current events knows that the first experiment on our freedoms happened long ago. Worse, we have not heeded the warnings of Madison and those like him who understood that if you give the government an inch, they will take a mile. Unfortunately, the government has not only taken a mile, they have taken mile after mile after mile after mile with seemingly no end in sight for their power grabs. All of the signs point to something nasty up ahead.

Even though the odds are never in our favor, there is still hope. Not everyone has to make the extreme sacrifice in order to contribute to the revolution. There are thousands of small acts which will weaken the establishment: "Don’t be a slave to debt. Live beneath your means and accumulate some physical silver and gold. Don’t vote for candidates selected by the vested interests. Spread the message of liberty and freedom to anyone who will listen. Think critically. Do not trust your government. Prepare for the inevitable collapse of this rotten, fetid, corrupt paradigm."

Each year more than one trillion dollars goes up in smoke. More accurately, it is stolen from the middle and working classes and shipped off to the one percent. We are talking about the massive yearly bill to maintain the US empire. What can we do to work for peace in 2016? First we must tune out the lying propaganda served up by the US mainstream media. We must educate ourselves so that we can help educate others.

Two weeks ago we said that "those who have savings at US banks, please don't hold your breath to see any increase on the meager interest said deposits earn." We were wrong: some should certainly have held their breath, because as the WSJ reports today, "some bank customers won’t have to wait much longer to reap benefits from the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates." Some, such as clients of J.P. Morgan, which will begin raising deposit rates for some of its "biggest clients" in January. "Biggest" clients, of course, is a universal euphemism for "wealthiest."

Freedom is one of the most precious and hard-won of all conditions in life. A government applies the removal of freedoms in a ratchet effect; once a freedom has been taken away from a population, it’s rarely returned. Therefore, freedom tends to deteriorate over time in any nation, no matter how idealistically-founded it may have been. None of us can fully escape the more predatory tendencies of governments. We can, however, question their every move and adjust our lives so that the State’s impact on us is minimised.

Congress ended the U.S. crude oil export ban last week. There is apparently no longer a strategic reason to conserve oil because shale production has made American great again. At least, that’s narrative that reality-averse politicians and their bases prefer. Congress’ decision to lift the 40-year U.S. ban on crude oil exports reflects the same misinformed and distorted thinking that declares that the world’s highest cost producer - tight oil - can somehow also be the world’s swing producer.

"This year is a wake-up call to think about lower returns for the next several years," notes BMO's Lowell Yura, warning that "investor expectations for both equities and bonds have been [mistakenly] elevated by recent history." According to data compiled by Bianco Research, 2015 could be the worst for asset allocation funds since World War I. Simply put, nothing worked, as for the first time since 2001, none of the major asset-classes returned more than 10%.  As Jim Bianco concludes, “The Fed stimulus lifted all boats, and then the Fed withdrawing the stimulus is holding the boats down."