America

The core thread of next year's relatively downbeat "surprises" from Seabreeze Partners' Doug Kass is that the crowd is wearing Trump-colored glasses and that the single-biggest surprise is how quickly the bloom comes off the Trump flower.

In 2017 Donald Trump no longer will be seen as an invincible politician or a self-proclaimed stock market savior (see Surprise #3). Rather, he will learn, the hard way, the difficulty in governing and what Mario Cuomo meant when he said, "Campaign in poetry, govern in prose."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims that “it’s very clear” that the US-led coalition is supporting terrorist groups in Syria, including ISIS. There is ‘confirmed evidence’ that the US-led coalition supports ISIS & other terrorists in Syria the Turkish leader told reporters in Ankara RT reports: Saying that the US have accused Turkey of supporting IS, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday the Turkish leader blamed the US-led coalition for assisting terrorists themselves.

Having recently won the crucial battle for Aleppo, which has changed the layout of the ongoing Syrian proxy war between the Assad regime (with the Kremlin's backing), and "rebel" forces including various Al-Qaeda elements (supported by the US-led alliance), hardly content with this crucial victory Russian president Vladimir Putin is only just getting started, and as the Daily Beast confirms reports that had previously circulated in the Russian press, dozens of highly trained "Chechen killer" Russian special military units in red berets are being transported to Syria.

Staunch Hillary Clinton supporter (and vehement anti-Trump-er) Warren Buffett had a better year than any other billionaire on earth... thanks to Donald Trump.

Buffett's net worth is up around $12 billion this year - with the majority of his gains coming in the weeks since Trump was elected - sending him up the ranks to become the 2nd richest man in the world (behind Bill Gates).

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

It will be the middle class that accepted the notion that "real estate is the foundation of family wealth" that will be stripmined by higher taxes on immobile assets such as real estate.

Correspondent Joel M. submitted an article that struck me as a harbinger of the future: In Greece, Property Is Debt: