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"It is our humble belief that the consensus at the Fed does not fully understand the magnitude of the problems in corporate credit markets and the unintended consequences of their policy actions."

Inequality of wealth is inequality of power. A study just released finds that "America’s 20 wealthiest people — a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet — now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households.” How much political power do the people who would be inside that jet — and their friends — actually have?

The system is beyond the point where it is merely showing stresses and fractures. Things are now falling apart and there may well be no way of putting them back together again. The media will continue to claim everything is fine, until the day of panic and reckoning when it will suddenly be the "next Greece" or "2008 all over again"... but worse.

Here is what really happened: the ECB tried to engineer a modest market selloff because the "market needed to be disappointed", coupled with a modest rise in the EUR to give the Fed some rate-hike breathing room. Instead the market's dramatic overreaction in stocks and FX forced Draghi to not only panic but to publicly come out and admit that the only purpose of his Friday speech was to offset the damage from his failure to defeat the opposition at the governing council and to send markets surging. Which they promptly did.

The next time you wonder where the Fed Chairwoman is seeing wage growth, the answer is simple: they are looking at your boss' paycheck, yours... not so much.

So how do you grow household wealth by $18 trillion in the face of these dismal real world trends? In a word, with a printing press. But what happened today is that Draghi showed he is out of tricks and Yellen confessed she is out of excuses. Yes, this sucker is going down. And this time all the misguided economics professors turned central bankers in the world will be powerless to reverse the plunge.

Update: DMV releases driver's license photo of Farook

In a press briefing on Thursday, San Bernardino officials catalogued the weapons and ammo discovered in the vehicle and home of Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik who killed 21 and wounded 14 on Wednesday. Additionally, CNN (citing "sources") says Farook was likely "radicalized." The pair were "well equipped" and could have staged another attack, police say.

Silicon Valley has been in a food fight for about three years now. Everyone knows it’s going to end, except for the folks in Silicon Valley. Anyone who invested at these valuations will richly deserve what’s coming to them. Those prices were cuckoo.

If we are forced to keep our money in the bank... and cash is outlawed... the Deep State will have total economic control over us all.

The global Central Banks have literally bet the financial system that their theories will work.  They haven’t. All they’ve done is set the stage for an even worse crisis in which entire countries will go bankrupt.

We are talking of course, about the infamous RRR-hike of 1936-1937, which took place smack in the middle of the Great Recession.

The EU’s political leaders and other elites are committed to holding the European Union together. To them, united Europe is an article of faith. They hold the idea with as much ferocity and fervor as any religious belief. But while the European Union is a wonderful political idea, it’s economically terrible. And the EU nations will have to face up to bearing enormous costs to save the Europe we wished for.

From "pumping out lots of jobs" in September to "not slowing meaningfully" in October, and despite consistent job losses in manufacturing (which is odd because auto sales are so awesome, right?), ADP reports November a jump to 217k (against expectations of 190k and October's 182k). ADP has missed expectations 8 months so far in 2015, but November's beat is the biggest since 2014 which one could argue was just catch up from ADP's big miss relative to BLS data (182 ADP with an upward revision to 196K now, vs 271k BLS). Of course, none of this "data" matters apparently as Fed's Lockhart said just this morning that the Fed's "criterion of job market improvement has been met."

“It is not in doubt. ISIS is almost finished. They are weak. If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days.”