New Zealand

Passports are nothing more than a form of control - a way to obtain oodles of personal information and to restrict one of the most basic freedoms of humanity - the freedom to move. So you can imagine how excited we were when we read about Australia’s government announcing a program to eliminate passports. Great news, right? Well, no...

As tipped earlier this month, Deutsche Bank just turned in a Q3 loss of €6 billion as a raft of writedowns hit the bottom line. The bank also announced more details of "Strategy 2020", which include layoffs and a corporate rethink that will see Europe's largest bank exit a multitude of markets. 

If there's no risk of a systemic event, why are regulators moving to implement rules that would make it so firms and funds can freeze your money in the event of a crisis?

Prepare for taxes of all kinds: wealth, stealth, and even carry taxes (on physical cash).

In the event of a systemic European banking crisis, however, laws could be changed at the stroke of a pen and “bail-in” mechanisms could become fully operational. Also, the comforting guarantee of €100,000 ($100,000 or £80,000) would likely be reduced in such a crisis.

When it comes to “prepping”, many among the elite take things to an entirely different level. 

Despite today's ridiculous melt-up in US equities - all driven by USDJPY-correlated algos - after the completion of over 9 months of this year, the median stock in the United States has officially gone nowhere.

The global elite have never been closer to their goal of a united world.  Thanks to a series of interlocking treaties and international agreements, the governance of this planet is increasingly becoming globalized and centralized, but most people don’t seem alarmed by this at all.  In the past 30 days, we have seen some of the biggest steps toward a one world government, a one world economy and a one world religion that we have ever witnessed, but these events have sparked very little public discussion or debate...

With FIFA executive heads falling faster than Glencore stock (with Blatter and Platini most recently and today the entire Kuwait FA), it appeared we had reached some kind of peak debacle.. but no! German newspaper Der Spiegel reports that the German bidding committee created a slush fund in its effort to garner votes from Asian FIFA officials, land the rights to host the 2006 World Cup (which they did by 12 votes to 11).

In the absence of any key economic developments in the Asian trading session, Asian stocks traded mostly under the influence of the late, pre-opex US ramp momentum courtesy of another day of ugly economic data in the US (bad econ news is good news for liquidity addicts), closing solidly in the green across the board, led by China (+1.6%) and Japan (+1.1%) thanks in no small part to the latest tumble in the Yen carry trade, which mirrored a bout of USD overnight weakness. And since a major part of the risk on move yesterday was due to Ewald Nowotny's comments welcoming more QE, news from Eurostat that Eurozone CPI in September dropped -0.1% confirming Europe's deflation continues, should only be greeted with even more buying as it suggests further easing by the ECB is inevitable.

Gains in the foreign currencies appears to be mostly short-covering rather than bottom-picking per se.  In bigger picture the dollar is consolidating its earlier gains.

One weekend. The process was not gradual. It was sudden and it was total: once it began in earnest, the banks were closed and you couldn’t get your money out (more on this in a moment).

In what seems like a nervous populist move amid Bernie Sanders' gains, Hillary Clinton has flip-flopped rather stunningly to oppose President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership. Despite supporting the bill at least 45 times, as CNN's Jake Tapper points out, Clinton told PBS' Judy Woodruff Wednesday in Iowa that, "As of today, I am not in favor of what I have learned about it." It's also a departure from the Clinton legacy, as CNN notes, it was President Bill Clinton who, two decades ago, signed the first mega-regional pact: the North American Free Trade Agreement.

We have just witnessed one of the most significant steps toward a one world economic system that we have ever seen.  Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership have been completed, and if approved it will create the largest trading bloc on the planet.  In this treaty, Barack Obama has thrown in all sorts of things that he never would have been able to get through Congress otherwise.  And once this treaty is approved, it will be exceedingly difficult to ever make changes to it.  So essentially what is happening is that the Obama agenda is being permanently locked in for 40 percent of the global economy.

Once again the corporatocracy wins as the so-called "Trojan horse" Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement has been finalized. As WSJ reports, the U.S., Japan and 10 countries around the Pacific reached a historic accord Monday to lower trade barriers to goods and services and set commercial rules of the road for two-fifths of the global economy, officials said.