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“I was really worried. Everyone who thought of going for the end of the year will have to cancel. Nobody is going to pay 2,000 reais for a holiday package to go to a place where people say the mud is."

In an unexpected turn of events, the disappearance of not just synthetic but very physical dollars has hit one region much harder and much faster than we expected. Africa.

An analysis of terror attacks since 2002 suggests U.S. efforts to combat terrorism - i.e., the "War on Terror" - have led to a dramatic increase in death and suffering from terrorism.

The latest semi-unicorn to drop like a fly was none other than Foursquare, a company which makes apps that do something that most other apps already do as well if not better. Actually make that Twosquare, or rather Oneandathirdsquare, because according to ReCode, the company is close to finalizing a funding round that will see the company's value plunge to $250 million, almost two-thirds less than the $650 million it was "valued" at two years ago.

Back in August, angry investors captured Shan Jiuliang, the head of Fanya Metals Exchange, in a daring predawn raid on a luxury hotel in Shanghai. The citizen's arrest came after Fanya stopped making payments on WMPs it issued. Now, it appears as though Shan has been captured again - only this time, it's not clear whether he'll be coming back.

"The last straw was the amount of food the Americans provided – 200 pounds of rice and 200 pounds of kidney beans, enough for each of the course graduates for a week or two, but not for their families, who are in dire financial straits. That’s when the group voted to take two weeks off."

Needless to say, these names are just the beginning: once the redemptions - and gating - genie is out of the bottle, there is no putting it back.

“I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here ... and ... around the world, that there is a ‘clash of civilizations.'” So said Hillary Clinton in Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate. Yet, that phrase was not popularized by Donald Trump, but by Harvard’s famed Samuel Huntington. That Clinton is unaware of the thesis, or dismisses it, does not speak well of the depth of her understanding of our world.

People are waking up to the darkness in American policing, and the cops don't like it one bit...

The Fed seems to have been operating on the theory that their own views on the economy determine its path. But recently the Fed has taken the principle to an extreme never seen. Yellen may well have just hiked rates expecting, hoping, that the mere act of showing confidence in the economy would produce an economy worthy of confidence. The Fed has dominated the narrative for years now, investors and traders hanging on every word. Last week that started to change, the market repudiating the Fed’s outlook over a 48 hour period that must have produced some second guessing at the Fed.

While many still cling to the belief that U.S. shale and tight oil plays are commercial even at current low oil prices but data on the Permian basin and Bakken plays simply does not support this hope. In fact, less than 2 percent of Permian basin tight oil wells are commercial at $30 per barrel oil prices.

And so Wall Street has set its sights on the next junk bond fund casualty, a name which is well-known to most equity market participants: none other than Waddell and Reed (WDR), the fund which rose to infamy in the aftermath of the May 2010 Flash Crash, after it was initially blamed by the SEC as the culprit behind the Dow's 1000 point crash...

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious, but the stupid have an answer for everything.” ~Edward Abbey

A world where money is decentralized means a world where nothing you’ve ever seen before will become the new norm and the new norm is unlikely to include a scrap of paper issued by a bankrupt government.

Perhaps the first step in rectifying our situation is to begin to look at the world not as it could be, but how it is. To see things for what they are, to discard the falsehoods, no matter how pleasant they may seem in order to embrace the truth regardless of how painful it may be. And that’s not a theory, that’s a reality.