Europe

Submitted by Alex Gorka via Stratgic-Culture.org,

Matteo Renzi resigned as the Italian Prime Minister after the people of Italy voted «no» in a historic referendum on constitutional reform on December 4. The vote results triggered a shock wave across Europe much like Brexit. It’s up to Italian President Sergio Mattarella now to decide what will happen next – an appointment of new prime minister supported by parliamentary majority or a snap election, paving the way for an anti-euro party, the 5-Star Movement, to come to power.

Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

Our economy is a mystery to almost everyone, including economists. Let me explain the way I see the situation:

(1) The big thing that pulls the economy forward is the time-shifting nature of debt and debt-like instruments.

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Let’s say you have two equal size safety deposit boxes.

One box you completely fill up with stacks of $100 bills.

The other box you fill up with gold.

Which of the two is “worth” more?

It’s easy to calculate. A stack of 100x $100 bills is 6.14 inches long, 2.61 inches wide, and 0.43 inches tall.

From "the end of cash" to "Trump muzzling The Fed" to "Russia going on the warpath", Nomura unveils its unlikely-but-impactful grey swan scenarios for 2017...

As Nomura writes, while we would like to be able to predict black swans, by definition they are unpredictable. However, its close cousin, the grey swan, can be envisaged.

While the WaPo admitted, two weeks after its infamous hit piece on "fringe media" which it labelled as "Russian propaganda fake news", that its entire article was based on reporting that was wrong, the adverse consequences are piling up for the sites named in the list, among which the popular conservative hangout Breitbart. German carmaker BMW, the restaurant chain Vapiano, supermarket chain Rewe, and Deutsche Telekom have all pulled their ads from the pro-Trump news site due to concerns about its content, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.