United States

Back in June, this website first "solved" the "mystery" behind America's missing inflation, when we showed that a record number of US renters are unable to afford housing, suggesting that record amounts of "disposable income" were being diverted for use as a shelter "tax" instead of being spent on true discretionary goods and services, leading (together with the Obamacare tax) to the broad and distressing decline in not only traditional retail sales and moribund consumer spending, and the "secular" economic slowdown observed over the past several years.

A situation is brewing in cities all across the United States while millions of dollars in profits are on the table and hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake. In the current US neoliberal system, the winners are the few on the inside and the losers are all of the rest of us. This is especially true while the taxi industry undergoes a game-changing transformation.

In September, interbank credit markets flashed a quick and brief warning that something was up... and Janet folded. Three months later and following The Fed's oddly-timed rate-hike, interbank counterparty risk - as proxied by the TED-Spread - has spiked over 45% in 2 days, the most since Sept 2008 (Lehman).

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s seminal masterpiece Crime and Punishment is often thought of as one of the longest classics at more than 200,000 words.

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, which was signed into law on Friday, is nearly twice as long.

In case you’re not familiar with the background, the author was once quite wealthy.

But through years of reckless, irresponsible behavior, he gambled away his wealth until he was impoverished and unable to pay his creditors.

Submitted by James H Kunstler via Kunstler.com,