United States

Once again, China was faced with the unpleasant task of deciding which asset class to intervene in: its plunging stock market, or its currency. It chose the latter, and as a result after a turbulent start the Shanghai Composite sank by 5.3% to close just above 3000 and down 15% in just the past 11 days, suggesting that the PBOC is increasingly seeing the CNY1.8 trillion (at least) spent to stabilize stocks as a sunk cost.

A Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) report circulating the Kremlin states that one of the United States top Navy commanders, Admiral Rick Williams, was fired after he sent out an email detailing plans by President Obama to purchase a multi-million dollar villa in Dubai.  Admiral Williams emailed a query on 8 January to the US Naval Institute’s “Readiness Kill Chain” “recipients/responders” list asking why Navy security and intelligence personal had been dispatched from Camp David to Dubai on what he termed an “Obama house hunting mission”.

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

The Proof Is In: The US Government Is The Most Complete Criminal Organization In Human History

In late 2014 and early 2015, we tried to warn anyone who cared to listen time and time and time again that crashing crude prices are unambiguously bad for the economy and the market, contrary to what every Keynesian hack, tenured economist, Larry Kudlow and, naturally, central banker repeated - like a broken - record day after day: that the glorious benefits of the "gas savings tax cut" would unveil themselves any minute now, and unleash a new golden ago economic prosperity and push the US economy into 3%+ growth.

As we have reported on numerous prior occasions, the biggest marginal buyer of stocks in both 2014 and 2015 (and forecast to remain in 2016), are corporations themselves, using debt-funded buybacks to push their stocks to record highs, allowing the smart money to sell in record amounts.

But what happens when companies are so levered that they can't possibly afford to issue any more debt, virtually all of which has been used to repurchase stocks, as we have shown before...