United States

Collecting rainwater on your own property can now lead to jail time, as proven by a man from Oregon who was sentenced to prison for doing just that.  Who owns the rain? The US government, apparently so it seems. Not so long ago, it was common practice across much of the world to collect rainwater into man made wells on your property to use for farming, irrigation and having fresh clean water.  It was just as common as canning your own food, having knowledge of at least some basic survival skills, and being self-sufficient.

To awaken Thursday to front-page photos of U.S. sailors kneeling on the deck of their patrol boat, hands on their heads in postures of surrender, on Iran’s Farsi Island, brought back old and bad memories.

In January 1968, LBJ’s last year, 82 sailors of the Pueblo were captured by North Korea and held hostage with Captain Lloyd “Pete” Bucher, and abused and tortured for a year before release.

In the final 444 days of the Carter presidency, 52 Americans were held hostage in Tehran, and released only when Ronald Reagan raised his hand to take the oath.

The last 12 months have not been kind to WalMart. 

When the world's largest retailer bowed to pressure to raise wages for its lowest-paid employees, the living wage crowd cheered. In short order, it became apparent that the reverberations from the $1.5 billion endeavor would spell trouble for the company.

When a series of ill-fated efforts to squeeze the supply chain failed to plug the gap, the company resorted to store closures (or "plumbing" as WalMart calls it), job cuts in Bentonville, and reduced hours. 

Several days ago, Bank Of America was "confused" why retail spending refuses to pick up, although it hoped that this would be a one time aberation and that the official government data would disprove what it was seeing in its card data. Well, that did not happen after the headline retail sales printed moments ago at -0.1% in December, falling from an upward revised 0.4%.

As Bloomberg summarizes, sales at U.S. retailers declined in December to wrap the weakest year since 2009, raising concern about the momentum in consumer spending heading into 2016.

Late last month, Freeport McMoRan co-founder and executive chairman James R. Moffett was shown the door.

Moffett, known as the “last of the old-time wildcatters”, was a legend in the industry but made a fatal mistake in 2013: he paid $2.1 billion for McMoRan Exploration Co (an oil-and-gas company the parent company had separated from in the 1990s), and $6.9 billion for Plains Plains Exploration & Production.

As WSJ put it, “the deals in part were a bet that oil prices would remain high.”