Reality

Everybody can see Janet Yellen standing naked in that corner - more like a box canyon - and it’s not a pretty sight. But the mundane truth probably is that events have finally caught up with the structural distortions of a financial world running on illusion. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and economic winter is finally upon us. All the world ‘round, people borrowed too much to buy stuff and now they’re all borrowed out and stuffed up. Welcome to the successor to the global economy: the yard sale economy, with all the previously-bought stuff going back into circulation on its way to the dump.

"One of the sad side-effects, is successful strategies, with liquid investments that are built for volatile markets and have no gates, become the piggy-bank for everyone that needs cash."

At this point, many readers may be thinking to themselves that it can’t get any worse. 

"In short, the age of unconventional monetary policy begun by the 2007-09 financial crisis might not be ending."

- Jon Hilsenrath

As in George Orwell’s 1984, the IMF is dividing the world into warring factions - the West vs. the BRICS. To avoid the coming conflict that the neoconservatives’ pursuit of American hegemony is bringing, the Russians have relied on fact-based, truth-based diplomacy. However, neocon Washington relies on lies and propaganda and has many more and much louder voices. Consequently, it is Washington’s lies, not Russia’s truth, that most of the Western sheeple believe. The Western peoples are so dimwitted that they have not yet understood that the “war on terror” is, in fact, a war to create terror that can be exported to Muslim areas of Russia and China in order to destabilize the two countries that serve as a check on Washington’s unilateral, hegemonic power.

Massive change is coming but don't expect your local banker to see it coming and let you know about it

What stinks in Saudi Arabia ain’t the camel dung. It’s the monarchy of King Salman and his hot-headed son, Prince Salman. For decades they have financed terrorism under a fake religious disguise, to advance their private plutocratic agenda. It has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with money and oil. Saudi control of that oil wealth (from Iraq to Syria) via their ISIS agents, along with her clear plan to take out the US shale oil competition, or so Riyadh reckons, would make the Saudi monarchy a vastly richer state.

Great news! The "greatest threat to future generations of the world" has apparently been solved. World leaders Saturday adopted an historic international climate accord in Paris, the first-ever agreement to commit almost every country to fight climate change. However, as we knew all along and just got confirmation, the 31-page pact does not have binding language or a mechanism to force countries to live up to the promises to cut greenhouse gases.

The lies we tell ourselves are only exceeded by the lies perpetrated by those controlling the levers of our society. The country has been living a Big Lie since the day Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, eliminating any vestiges of constraint upon central bankers and politicians.

"A flip to fiscal stimulus is the most likely catalyst for a Great Rotation out of “deflation plays” into “inflation plays”, undoubtedly the biggest investment decision of 2016. Sadly it took the New Deal and WW2 to end the dominance of “growth” over “value” in the 1930s."

While the world patiently waits for Janet Yellen to raise interest rates this month, the markets have been unable to decide as of yet whether such an event is good or bad thing.

Finland made the news recently by proposing a pilot program of guaranteed income for all, also known as Universal Basic Income: Desperate Finland Set To Unleash Helicopter Money Drop To All Citizens. Proponents claim Basic Income can be paid by redirecting existing welfare programs, but a quick review reveals this as nonsense.