Business

While world leaders signed the 'historic' agreement signed in Paris to fix the world's "greatest threat," a natural gas storage site in southern California is belching 145,000 pounds per hour of Methane - a greenhouse gas 70 times more potent than carbon dioxide. What is worse, while official proclaim this a "top priority" a fix won't arrive until spring as emergency crews recognize "the leak was far from routine, and the problem was deeper underground."

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

US stocks soared while the Fed was meeting to raise interest rates this week - though it’s not clear why that should be so since monetary tightening isn’t generally a good thing for stock prices.

In any event, it didn’t last. Over the past 48 hours the Dow is down more than 3%, with many, many individual stocks down far more.

Make no mistake, it’s been a tough year for the 2 and 20 crowd. 

Between an inexorable slump in commodities (which has led directly to a burgeoning HY crisis), the volatility that comes with pervasive monetary policy confusion, a “surprise” China deval, tail risk galore, and a variety of spectacular blow ups (see Ackman and Valeant), it’s become abundantly clear that when it comes to truth in advertising, hedge funds fail miserably as protecting against massive fat tail events apparently isn’t their cup of tea after all (see here for more).

While most sellside "research" has traditionally been complete garbage, either meant to boost soft dollar revenues and build client goodwill by giving one-on-one "expert network" meetings with management, or a macro echo chamber of equity strategists all of whom are terrified to stray from the penguin, or is it lemming, flock (its only utility is to give insight into whatever the prevailing groupthink consensus is, allowing an easy opportunity to fade it) and desperate to be as optimistic as possible (there is little upside on Wall Street to be a pessimist or a realist) there are the occasi

Not only did the Fed miss its window of opportunity to hike rates, but it did so at the worst possible time, launching the first tightening cycle in 11 years just as US manufacturing entered its first recession since the financial crisis, just as the credit cycle entered its slowdown phase, and just as the default cycle is picking up, first in the energy sector one year ago and now spreading to all other industries.