SPY

This is WAY beyond ‘if you see something, say something.’

For all intents and purposes, the National Security Agency has supposedly ceased its bulk collection of metadata from Americans’ phone calls, but read the fine print: nothing is going to change.

Obviously, oil, gas, and coal companies are not going away (at least those not near bankruptcy), but low prices are not the only existential threat facing the industry. The political movement to act on climate change is picking up steam, and the legal case against ExxonMobil perfectly illustrates that growing threat.

"First, the Islamic world has been the victim of terror and brutality to a larger extent territorially, to greater amount quantitatively and for a longer period in terms of time. Second, that unfortunately this violence has been supported by certain great powers through various methods and effective means."

Americans today are blissfully distracted by their iGadgets, plotting out their holiday shopping strategies, leasing new cars, eating out, and buying advance tickets to the new Star Wars movie. They don’t see the wicked winter squalls ahead which will try their souls. We are experiencing the lull before the storms, but the storms are surely coming. The potential for catastrophe is high and burying our heads in the sand is not a strategy.

As previewed earlier today, moments ago the EU and Turkey reached a deal in which Europe would give Erdogan another €3 billion to be embezzled accordingly (perhaps to buy more tankers for Erdogan's son with which to ferry ISIS oil, or to build a new annex for his palace, or just to recycle the money and purchase even more F-16s from the US), in exchange for which Turkey would promise to close its borders to millions of outpouring Syrian refugees and agree to accept deported refugees already located in Europe.

Perhaps Voltaire said it best: "To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?"

Banana Republic 101: when the despotic president of a corrupt regime is faced with facts exposing his lllegal activity, what does he do? He arrests and journalists who discovered said facts, and demands they spend the rest of their lives behind bars. Welcome to Turkey.

Is Apple going to produce more electric vehicles ten years from now than BMW?

"The dealer market has collapsed, and all that's left are investors trading the same few bonds back and forth, leaving pricing services guessing with bigger and bigger margins of error on the real value of illiquid debt. That's the real problem. And it's not one the SEC can fix by targeting 'transcendent liquidity' in ETFs."

• US dollar sell-off: Nov’15 Global FMS shows “long dollar” most crowded trade
• EM rally: China deval complicates rally but humiliated EM ripe for bounce as Fed hike expectations peak
• Positioning less "bearish": risk rally is "narrow" and vulnerable to quick profit-taking in event-rich December: deteriorating RSP/SPY ratio

Instead of Listening to Idiots Talking Their Book ... Let's Fact-Check the Myths

No outside force can end freedom in America. The only force that can end freedom in America, is the American government itself. This is the main lesson of the 15 years since 9/11.

You didn’t think the surveillance state would give up that easily did you? Of course not. Unsurprisingly, fresh off the heels of the Paris terror attacks, the usual authoritarian suspects in the U.S. government are running around exploiting the tragedy in a bid to further erode privacy and civil liberties.

Here are some of the lessons we in the United States learned too late about allowing our freedoms to be eviscerated in exchange for the phantom promise of security. The over-arching principle is simply this: once you start down the road towards a police state, it will be very difficult to turn back.