A week after the Greek Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras, was unable to push through his nominee for president, Stavros Dimas, in a vote in parliament that needed 200 votes to pass, hours ago the second presidential vote took place and just like last week it again failed to secured the needed 200 votes, with just 168 lawmakers voting for the designated appointee. This means that in the third and final voting round next week, on December 29 - a trading day where bad news will propagate like wildfire in the absence of any market liquidity and means Kevin Henry will have to work overtime buying ETFs - New Democracy's Samaras has to find (or bribe) another 12 votes or else Greece is facing a snap election where the anti-bailout/anti-austerity leftist Syriza party is expected to win, and set off a chain of events that may result in Greece being kicked out of the Eurozone at least if the jitters seen during the summer of 2012 are any indication.

WWII is still reshaping our economic reality. The subsequent baby booms in the US and globally in Japan, Europe, and so many more locations which were affected by the war created a “pig in the python” moment. This unusually large wave of population growth from ’45-’55 was “pent up demand” from the war. But society and its leaders assumed this baby boom anomaly to be the new reality.  The “pig is passing” from the American and global workforce into retirement and now the wreckage and folly of such basic misnomers has come home to roost…and will get far worse.

Despite the authorities' best efforts to keep everything orderly, we know how this global Game of Geopolitical Tetris ends: "Players lose a typical game of Tetris when they can no longer keep up with the increasing speed, and the Tetriminos stack up to the top of the playing field. This is commonly referred to as topping out."

"I’m tired of being outraged!"

According to Goldman's own calculations, the demand squeeze for the High Quality Collateral that is global "Developed Market" Treasurys is about to go through the roof mostly thanks to central banks which will - even in the Fed's temporary hiatus from the monetization scene - soak up an unprecedented amount of Treasury collateral from both the primary issuance and secondary private market in their scramble to push global equity prices to unseen bubble levels and achieve the kind of Keynes-vindicating, demand-pull inflation that Russia was delighted to enjoy in the past several weeks.
How much?  The answer: a lot, as in a whopping 20% collapse in supply, once the ECB joins the fray!

Every year, David Collum writes a detailed "Year in Review" synopsis full of keen perspective and plenty of wit. This year's is no exception. "I have not seen a year in which so many risks - some truly existential - piled up so quickly. Each risk has its own, often unknown, probability of morphing into a destructive force. It feels like we’re in the final throes of a geopolitical Game of Tetris as financial and political authorities race to place the pieces correctly. But the acceleration is palpable. The proximate trigger for pain and ultimately a collapse can be small, as anyone who’s ever stepped barefoot on a Lego knows..."

The current illusion of recovery is a result mainly of windfalls to the financial asset owning upper strata, the explosion of transfer payments funded with borrowed public money and another supply-side bubble - this time in the energy sector and its suppliers and infrastructure. But that’s not real growth or wealth. Indeed, the desultory truth about the latter is better revealed by the fact that the American economy is not even maintaining its 20th century level of breadwinner jobs. And the real state of affairs is further testified to by the lamentable trend in real median household incomes. That figure - not distorted by the bubble at the top of the income ladder - is still lower than it was two decades ago. So much for the Keynesian rap. Yet that’s about all that underpins the latest Wall Street rip.

Virtually every day there is an eruption of lunacy from one central bank or another somewhere in the world. In short, the central banks of the world are embroiled in a group-think mania so extreme and irrational that it puts one in mind of the spasm of witchcraft trials that erupted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony nearly four centuries ago.  As a practical matter, this mania amounts to a race to the currency bottom and the final extinguishment of the price discovery mechanism in every financial market on the planet. Flying blind, the financial markets are thus bubbling - in the delirium phase - like never before. That is, until they don’t.

"...so many still maintain that America is the greatest nation in the world.  They swear that America represents all that is good; freedom, democracy, merit based capitalism and the rights of the individual.  That is true America does represent such things.  However, it is fraudulent to consider our current nation America.  America was a concept that promoted all that is good.  And so it would seem that the nation in which they find themselves cannot be America.  Their nation today represents the will of the political class at all costs, period.  Their sole motivation is themselves.  Very different from America.  And so perhaps a renaming on the nation is required, at least until or if the people decide to take it back and reintroduce the world to the concept that is America for as discussed below you cannot destroy a concept and so there is hope to bring her back.  But until then we need a name for this geographic region and its new societal system... It seems"Neoconica" is most fitting."

While the entire financial world is hanging on to every Mario Draghi word in hope Europe finally improves the market's (if not the economy's) "fundamentals" to new record highs, and joins the rest of the "developed" world's central banks in injecting trillions of liquidity into the Div/0 P/E stocks "whatever it takes" (because in a world where only multiple expansion is left, the ECB is the last wildcard at least until the US is dragged right back into the global recession and the Fed admits any pipe dreams of a rate hike in 2015 were just that), something far more different may be taking place behind the scenes. According to at least one journalist, the Fiscal Times' Patrick Smith, "Draghi appears set to leave Frankfurt and return to his native Italy the first chance he gets."

The Federal Reserve and its owners print and party, while the rest of us work and weep..................

In the great fiscal scheme of things, October 22, 1981 seems like only yesterday. That’s the day the US public debt crossed the $1 trillion mark for the first time. It had taken the nation 74,984 days to get there (205 years). What prompts this reflection is that just a few days ago the national debt breached the $18 trillion mark; and the last trillion was added in hardly 365 days.

But, but, but all the clever talking heads said he had to do it now...

*DRAGHI SAYS ECB TO REASSESS CURRENT STIMULUS NEXT QUARTER, MAY NOT DECIDE ON NEW MEASURES IN JANUARY
*DRAGHI: DECISION TO CHANGE BALANCE SHEET LANGUAGE NOT UNANIMOUS

This is not what the market wanted to hear - Draghi kicking the can with no indication they are any closer to getting Zee Germans on board with direct monetization of European fiscal irresponsibility.

Money is stored labor. Labor is part of human life. To devalue money is to debase life itself.

Money is stored labor.  Labor is part of human life.  To devalue money is to debase life itself.

The last time the world's largest oil and gas drill operator, Seadrill, halted its dividend payment was in 2009, shortly after Lehman had filed and the world was engulfed in a massive depression. Retrospectively, this made sense: the company was struggling not only with depressionary oil prices, but with a legacy epic debt load as can be seen on the chart below. So the fact that the stock of Seadrill collapsed by 20% today following a shocking overnight announcement that it had once again halted its dividend despite what is a far lower debt load than last time, indicates that when it comes to energy companies, the current global economic "recovery" - if one believes the rigged US stock market - is actually worse than the Lehman collapse.