Happy New Year!

Last year (2015) likely will represent the top for the bull market that began in 2009. Stocks finished the year down, representing the first down year since the March 2009 bottom.

Many analysts will point to the August sell-off as the reason stocks performed so badly, however, looking at the chart, stocks struggled throughout the year, long before the August sell-off. Indeed, at best the S&P 500 was up 3% for the year!

Things are only going to worsen from here.

“The world is laughing at us, at our stupidity,” Donald trump told the Washington Post, in an interview on Sunday. “It’s got to stop. We’ve got to get smart fast — or else we won’t have a country.”

Those comments came as the GOP frontrunner gave the Post an exclusive look at his campaign’s first television spot, which is set to debut on Monday.

It all started off relatively well: oil and US equity futures were buoyant on hopes Iran and Saudi Arabia would break out in a bloody conflict any minute boosting the net worth of shareholders of the military industrial complex, and then, out of nowhere, like a depressed China in a bull shop, the "mainland" crashed the party following a terrible manufacturing PMI report, which sent Chinese stocks sliding slowly at first, then very fast.

Author and filmmaker Peter Valentino claims that New York city was ‘nuked’ on 9/11 using a 150 kiloton 70m deep underground nuclear weapon. Mike Philbin Blog reports: Author and film-maker Peter Valentino has put together a to-camera piece called the Papamundi Files, NYC Final Conclusions in which he discusses the meat & potatoes of his Kissinger Konfessional polemic-omentary Papamundi and the 911 Mechanism or what we know as the Great Magic Show of September 11th 2001.