At the peak of the craziness of the last cycle, banks took to protecting themselves by buying (credit) protection on other banks as a 'hedge' for systemic risk (which instead exacerbated contagion concerns, seemingly missing the facts that their bids drove risk wider, increaing counterparty risks, and that the inevitable collapse required to trigger these trades would also mean the payoffs to the 'hedges' would never be realized).

Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”—Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.

The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.

Submitted by Bill Bonner of Bonner & Partners (annotated by Acting-Man.com's Pater Tenebrarum),

Ganging up on the Donald

Poor Donald Trump. Everybody’s against him.

Jeb Bush says he’s “unhinged”...

...Chris Christie says he has “no idea what [he’s] talking about”...

...John Kasich accuses him of “outrageous divisiveness”…

The Donald – in reality, they love him…

...and Marco Rubio describes him as “offensive and outlandish.”

Americans have long lived in a nation made up primarily of middle-class families, neither rich nor poor, but comfortable enough, notes NPR's Marilyn Geewax, but this year - for the first time in US history, that changed. A new analysis of government data shows that as of 2015, middle-income households have become the minority, extending a multi-decade decline that confirms the hollowing out of society as 49% of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month.

“Turkey is acting recklessly and inexplicably,” Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN told the Security Council at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday.

Churkin was not, as you might have guessed, referring to Ankara’s brazen move to shoot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border late last month (although we’re quite sure that Moscow would classify that as “reckless and inexplicable” as well).