KIM

Though the banking elite are now increasingly being exposed for their criminal activities against humanity in their theft of citizens’ wealth, rarely is another one of their greatest transgressions, their theft of citizens’ minds and the process by which they target and transform young adults into docile, obedient creatures through institutional academia, ever discussed.

It seems between photos of the family Zuckerberg brunching Christmas Day and the revolt against the rules change, Instagram has been slapped with an exodus of users. As NY Post reports, Instagram, which peaked at 16.4mm users the week it rolled out the policy change, had fallen to 12.4mm users as of yesterday - a massive 25% plunge. The terms of service change which enabled the selling of user's photos 'without any compensation' seems to have perturbed more than a few tweens (including Justin Bieber and one of the Kardashians). How quickly the worm turns as these 'fad' sites come and go; from its busiest 24 hours over Thansgiving to a 25% plunge by Christmas - and all this as Twitter steps up its competition. We are sure that Facebook was priced for this decline though and will monetize the mobile exodus.

We believe that because the Rockefellers and Rothschilds created our “modern” banking system with the express diabolical intent of transferring the wealth of nations to themselves with zero work and of preventing the people of these nations from revolting through the imposition of debt enslavement achieved through the administration of the fractional reserve banking system, it is impossible to be a moral person and work for a bank.

Following on the heels of Byron Wien, Morgan Stanley's Surprises, and Saxo's Outrageous Predictions, Deutsche Bank's FX strategy team has created a who's who of 13 outliers for 2013. Quite frankly, given the extreme nature of monetary (and now fiscal) policy, asset allocation decisions, and bankers' and politicians' willingness to go into the media and lie directly to our faces, the comprehension of the possible (no matter how improbable) is far more important for risk management than the faith in the centrally-planned unreality our markets (and therefore ourselves) currently find themselves in. As they note, all too often, the tendency to not stray too far from a self-anchoring recent-history-extrapolated consensus (while apparently highly profitable for some for a microcosm of time) leads to unrecoverable drawdowns exactly when career-risk was the limiting factor. From Malaysian elections and EM bubbles bursting to Fed monetizing equities and South China Sea escalation, these outliers seem all to 'normal' in our brave new world.

Isn't it amazing that you can get more notoriety for showing your ass and a pretty smile than you can get for outing the scam of the decade through intellectual analysis? More money was lost through the Facebook scam IPO at $38 than Bernie Madoff could ever have pulled off.

What is going on here, for those understandably confused, is North Korea's gregarious and gorgeous leader, Kim Jong-un, sitting in the Korean equivalent of Houston, watching the recent Korean rocket launch... and smoking a cigarette. Take it away.

The most commonly forwarded arguments against the implementation of a true 100% gold-backed sound money system can easily be disproven and thoroughly debunked with a small dose of history and another dose of logic.

Bankers have engaged in a huge misinformation campaign against gold and silver to deliberately keep people out of buying gold and silver. If you’re a newbie thinking about buying gold and silver assets for the first time ever, here’s what you need to know.

In what is the first formal speech of Simon "Harry" Potter since taking over the magic ALL-LIFTvander wand from one Brian Sack, and who is best known for launching the Levitatus spell just when the market is about to plunge and end the insolvent S&P500-supported status quo as we know it, as well as hiring such sturdy understudies as Kevin Henry, the former UCLA economist in charge of the S&P discuss the "role of central bank interactions with financial markets." He describes the fed "Desk" of which he is in charge of as follows: "The Markets Group interacts with financial markets in several important capacities... As most of you probably know, in an OMO the central bank purchases or sells securities in the market in order to influence the level of central bank reserves available to the banking system... The Markets Group also provides important payment, custody and investment services for the dollar holdings of foreign central banks and international institutions." In other words: if the SPX plunging, send trade ticket to Citadel to buy tons of SPOOSs, levered ETFs and ES outright. That the Fed manipulates all markets: equities most certainly included, is well-known, and largely priced in by most, especially by the shorts, who have been all but annihilated by the Fed. But where it gets hilarious, is the section titled "Lessons Learned on Market Interactions through Prism of an Economist" and in which he explains why the Efficient Market Hypothesis is applicable to the market. If anyone wanted to know why the US equity, and overall capital markets, are doomed, now that they have a central planning economist in charge of trading, read only that and weep...

You've probably noticed the cookie-cutter format of most financial media "news": a few key "buzz words" (fiscal cliff, Bush tax cuts, etc.) are inserted into conventional contexts, and this is passed off as either "reporting" or "commentary" depending on the number of pundits sourced. Correspondent Frank M. kindly passed along a template that is "officially deny its existence" secret within the mainstream media. With this template, you could launch your own financial media channel, ready to compete with the big boys. Heck, you could hire some cheap overseas labor to make a few Skype calls to "the usual suspects," for-hire academics, hedge fund gurus, etc. and actually attribute the fluff to a real person.

It may be one of the smallest partner "classes" in recent Goldman history but for the 70 names below, today is one of the best days of their lives: it marks their induction into the real Master of the Galaxy club (sadly, not even Goldman is Master of the Universe any more). This is what Lloyd had to say: “We congratulate all those selected on this important achievement and look forward to their leadership in the years ahead." Spoiler alert: neither Greg Smith, nor Shashank Tripathi, are on the list.

The REAL World Series of Poker (WSOP) is a currency war with far greater implications and consequences for every human being on earth than the one that plays out in Las Vegas every year. Many of the Western nations' bluffs are now being exposed and falling apart.  This will have significant implications for much higher gold & silver prices in the future.

Here’s a breakdown of gold and silver performance by political party for the last 5 US Presidential terms.

Tim Geithner's public "servant" tenure has not been without its blemishes: from his deplorable run as the (figure)head of the New York Fed (from 2003 until 2009), when the entire financial system literally imploded under his watch, to his epic failing up as Hank Paulson's replacement as treasury Secretary of the United States, despite his legendary inability to navigate the Minotaurian labyrinth that is the TurboTax income tax flowchart, the Dartmouth alum has had his share of run ins with adversity (and adversity won). Of course, Geithner's tenure in charge of the Treasury in the past 4 years has been somewhat mollified by the fact that here too here was merely a figurehead, and the true entity that runs the US printing presses is none other than the JPM and Goldman Sachs co-chaired Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (for more on the TBAC read here and especially here as pertains to the former LTCM trader and current head of JPM's CIO group), meaning that the US Treasury, just like the Fed, are merely branches of the one true power in US governance: Wall Street. Geithnerian figureheadedness aside, the one undeniable fact is that Tim Geithner's days as head of the Treasury are now numbered: he has made it quite clear that he will not accompany Obama (should the incumbent be reelected) into his second term. So what is a career "public servant" to do once the public no longer has any interest in retaining his services? Bloomberg's Deborah Solomon has some suggestions...

Hands down, the best way to trade stock market volatility day today is simply not to do it, cash out, and purchase hard assets, in particular, precious metals.