Reality

...the Swiss canton of Zug is asking its citizens to delay paying their taxes for as long as possible, because the cantonal government doesn’t want to take in a pile of cash, only to end up paying the bank interest on all the tax revenue.

Another day, another plunge in The Baltic Dry Index, which just dropped a further 3.1% to 402 today - a new record low. While the index is driving headlines, under the surface, reality in the shipping (and shipbuilding) industry is a disaster. Total orders at Chinese shipyards tumbled 59% in the first 11 months of 2015, and as Bloomberg reports, with bulk ships accounting for 41.6% of Chinese shipyards’ $26.6 billion orderbook as of December, there is notably more pain to come, as one analyst warns "Chinese shipbuilders won’t be able to revive even if you try breathing some life into them."

As BofA admits, "we are increasingly concerned with this trend, as on an unadjusted basis non-commodity earnings growth has been negative 2 of the last 4 quarters, representing the worst 4 quarter average earnings growth in a non-recessionary period since late 2000."

Sort of like all those do it yourself Gold Mining shows hitting the reality television scene pretty much nailing the near term top in the gold market.

In the wake of a series of articles published over the weekend which suggested that both the police and the media in Sweden engaged in a coverup to conceal a series of sexual assaults from the public, authorities are in damage control mode. As the arrests begin, it seems likely that the far-right will capitalize on the scandal by blaming the mainstream parties for failing to protect the country's youth.

The Fed is, indeed, a political, oligarchic force, and a key part of what looks and functions like a banking cartel. During the 2007-08 financial crisis, the Fed’s true nature was clear to anyone paying attention. We can’t really know what we don’t know until we look. We owe it to the “swindled futurity” of the next generation to take a long, hard look through a full and independent audit of the Fed.

This decline is inevitable in fast-expanding economies that play fast and loose with credit/debt and leverage. All the phantom wealth piled up in China's boost phase is now melting down, and the China Syndrome will trigger a meltdown in global phantom assets.

Jim Cramer is so imbricated within the strictures of CNBC, so enamored of his guests, so genuflective and collegial that he has no critical distance to see the flaws of the very system of which he is a part. People like Cramer who are so invested (literally and figuratively) in the current financial system are loathe to realize that it is farcical, that it is built on toothpicks, that the corporate and government numbers are cooked, that the ‘recovery’ is a joke, that the ‘markets’ are rigged by central banks, that wrongdoing is epidemic, that there are no longer any rational connections between prices and fundamentals, that we have passed beyond reality into fantasyland. Cramer is the embodiment of a society awash in information but starved in meaning.

The problem is that when this sucker goes down, to paraphrase the immortal words of George W. Bush, you have to wonder how much other stuff of everyday life for everyday people it will take down with it. The discovery phase of our predicament began ever so crisply in the very first business week of the new year. The loss of faith in value of all kinds will play out sequentially. It is starting in financial “assets” because so many of these are just faith-based stories, and in this quant-and-algo age it has gotten awfully hard to tell what is good story and what is just a swindle.

Risk is now everywhere. If you invest in the markets, there is risk of temporary or permanent loss of capital. Even if you do nothing and simply hold cash in a bank, there is bail-in risk and financial repression. This is our reality now...Nothing is risk-free in this system of chaos. In a way, today’s mad scientist central bankers have engineered financial dinosaurs back into our time. They think they can control the system. But judging just from the first chaotic week in financial markets so far in 2016, life is finding a way.

The default of Sherwin Alumina, a US subsidiary of Glencore, refocused the market's attention on the one company which in September was among the hardest hit in the post-China devaluation rout, and the immediate result was that while Glencore stock plunged and is once again approaching all time lows, a more ominous development was that GLEN's CDS spiked to as much as 950 basis points, the highest since April 2009 and suggesting far more pain is in store for the commodity trading giant.

"Commerce between Europe and North America has literally come to a halt. For the first time in known history, not one cargo ship is in-transit in the North Atlantic between Europe and North America. All of them (hundreds) are either anchored offshore or in-port. NOTHING is moving. This has never happened before. It is a horrific economic sign; proof that commerce is literally stopped."

The momentous momentum stocks appear to have crashed into the reality of extreme valuations in a no-growth, carry-trade-unwind environment. It's not pretty out there...

Another algo-induced stop-run has tried and failed to maintain its gains this morning as Morgan Stanley becomes the latest (after Goldman) to join the "oil in the $20s is possible" bandwagon. Despite hopeful bullishness from Andy Hall who sees production destruction leading (an industry that couldn’t function at $50 certainly can't function with prices below $40) inevityably leading to higher prices, Morgan Stanley warns, "in an oversupplied market, there is no intrinsic value for crude oil. The only guide posts are that the ceiling is set by producer hedging while the floor is set by investor and consumer appetite to buy. As a result, non-fundamental factors, such as the USD, are arguably more important price drivers."

Many price-battered precious metals investors may currently be sitting on some quantity of capital that they plan to convert into gold and silver, but they are wondering when “the best time” is to do so.