Business

• Oil ends 2015 in downbeat mood; hangover to be long, painful (Reuters)
• Recession, retrenchment, revolution? Impact of low crude prices on oil powers (Guardian)
• Midwest Flooding Might Make the Oil Glut Worse (BBG)
• From Oil Glut to Shortage? Some Say It Could Happen (WSJ)
• Ten Years After Blowup, Amaranth Investors Waiting to Get Money Back (WSJ)
• China Fires a Warning Shot at Yuan Speculators With Bank Bans (BBG)
• PBOC Doesn't Offer Reverse Repos for First Time in Six Months (BBG)

It has come down to this: a year in which the US stock market (led by a handful of shares even as the vast majority of stocks has dropped) has gone nowhere, but took the longest and most volatile path to get there, is about to close either red or green for 2015 based on what happens in today's low-volume session following yesterday's unexpected last half hour of trading "air pocket" which brought the S&P back to unchanged for the year.

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

One hundred years ago European civilization, as it had been known, was ending its life in the Great War, later renamed World War I. Millions of soldiers ordered by mindless generals into the hostile arms of barbed wire and machine gun fire had left the armies stalemated in trenches. A reasonable peace could have been reached, but US President Woodrow Wilson kept the carnage going by sending fresh American soldiers to try to turn the tide against Germany in favor of the English and French.

With yet another false-dawn of crude prices blowing in the wind of cash-flow generation desperation, we thought it an appropriate time for a bigger picture glance at the state of the carnage in crude...

An ugly 2014 (down 46%)...

Brought an avalanche of knife-catching "once in a lifetime" opportunists into ETFs to buy the dip in as levered way as they could...

Only to see crude prices collapse another 31% in 2015 for the worst 2 year crash in the history of crude oil trading...

By EconMatters

Housing Demand Thesis

The last two years rents have been rising primarily due to supply and demand issues. There hasn`t been enough multifamily housing to keep up with the demand, and as the employment levels go up and more millennials move out of their parent`s house, I expect the housing market to continue to be on the slow but steady upswing of the last several years for 2016.