United States

Following years of QE-inspired excess returns, investors in 2016 suddenly find themselves embroiled in a broad and brutal bear market. As BofAML's Michael Hartnett notes, the 10-year rolling return loss from commodities (-5.1%) is currently the worst since 1938...

Oil peak-to-trough -80% past four years, EM currencies trading 15% below their 2009 lows, yield on US HY bonds up from 5% to 10% in past 18 months, and equal-weighted US stock index down 25% from recent highs...

The US total rig count dropped 18 to 619 in the last week with a drop of 12 in oil rigs (to 498) as the ongoing lagged drop of crude drives rig counts every lower. Perhaps oddly, given the rig count decline, WTI is tumbling as a 12 rig drop is clearly not enough...

• *U.S. TOTAL RIG COUNT DOWN 18 TO 619 , BAKER HUGHES SAYS
• *U.S. OIL RIG COUNT DOWN 12 TO 498, BAKER HUGHES SAYS

The trend continues...

And it appears the market wanted more rig count declines...

Charts: Bloomberg

Submitted by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

As the nation rightly focuses on Flint’s ongoing water crisis, other cities in the state of Michigan face even higher levels of lead contamination. The alarming pervasiveness of potentially toxic drinking water extends across the United States.

By now, not even CNBC's cheerleading permabulls can deny that the US is in a manufacturing recession: in fact, it is so bad that even the staunchest defenders of Keynesian dogma admit what we said in late 2014, namely that crashing oil is bad for the economy.

And yet, the "services" part of the US economy continues to hum right along, leading to such surprising outcomes as a stronger than expected print in Personal Consumption Expenditures. How can this be?

And so the final quarter of 2015 is in the history books and we can officially accuse the US Bureau of Economic Analysis of "peddling fiction" about the US recovery, because at a growth rate of 0.69%, the annualized rate of economic growth was the lowest since the first quarter of 2015 when it grew an almost identical 0.64% which was blamed on the harsh weather. This time however, there is no easy scapegoat.

The breakdown was as follows: