The old, pre-crisis view was that this was tantamount to insanity: there was a “zero bound to interest rates” which meant that they could never enter negative territory. The reason? People would simply not put up with them, and would pull their cash out of banks and hold notes and coins, which of course pay zero interest rates (and therefore come with an opportunity cost when rates are high but start to look attractive when interest rates fall below zero). In extremis, there would even be a run on bank accounts.

That said, the fact that interest rates of -0.5% or so are manageable doesn’t mean that interest rates of -4% would be. At some point, the cost of holding cash in a bank account would become prohibitive: savers would eventually rediscover the virtues of stuffed mattresses (or buying equities, or housing, or anything with less of a negative rate).

But abolishing cash wouldn’t actually work, and would come with terrible side-effects. For a start, people would begin to treat highly negative interest rates as a form of confiscatory taxation: they would be very angry indeed, especially if rates were significantly more negative than inflation. The policy would also blur monetary and tax policy: should central banks be in charge, or politicians? This would devastate central bank independence.

Abolishing cash would also abolish privacy, which would infuriate many. Economists have so far been proved wrong when it comes to the viability of negative interest rates. The last thing we now need is harebrained schemes to abolish cash. It wouldn’t work, and the public rightly wouldn’t tolerate it.

This is in stark contrast to previous claims by tech manufacturers, like Playstation, who vehemently deny their devices record personal information, despite evidence to the contrary, including news that hackers can gain access to unencrypted streams of credit card information. The new Samsung controversy stems from the discovery of a single haunting statement in the company’s “privacy policy,” which states: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.”

This sparked a back and forth between the Daily Beast and Samsung regarding not only consumer privacy but also security concerns. If our conversations are “captured and transmitted,” eavesdropping hackers may be able to use our “personal or other sensitive information” for identity theft or any number of nefarious purposes.

There is also the concern that such information could be turned over to law enforcement or government agencies. With the revelation of the PRISM program — by which the NSA collected data from Microsoft, Google, and Facebook — and other such NSA spying programs, neither the government nor the private sector has the benefit of the doubt in claiming tech companies are not conscripted into divulging sensitive consumer info under the auspices of national security.

Canadians were quite smug, back then, with the Canadian dollar trading above par with the US dollar and we wanted to remind them that not only would the Canadian dollar not be a haven from a US dollar collapse, but the loonie would collapse before the US dollar, since nothing is backing it but the US dollar and Canada had no gold (amongst many other reasons).

The Canadian government sold another 1.3 tons of gold in recent weeks and now holds an even smaller amount, 1.7 tons of gold, total. Back in 1965, Canada had 1,023 tons of gold reserves but by 1985 it only held 500 tons. As part of a central bank scheme to damp the price of gold against the dollar, Canada kept selling along with other banks. Canadians are already finding out how brutally mismanaged their currency has been. And Americans should take note because it will happen there next.

Throughout the 1990s up to 2002, Canada kept selling. And now it holds a laughable 1.7 tons. Compare that to China’s 1,700 tons. The US says it has 8,000+ tons, but no one has seen it since the 1950s… and we go by the “if no one has seen it in over 80 years it’s probably not there” rule.

Food prices have skyrocketed in Canada due to the decline of the Canadian dollar. Images have gone viral on the internet of $7 cauliflowers and celery and $3 cucumbers. While the Canadian government has been selling the last vestiges of its gold holdings, wise Canadians who have been buying gold have seen their investment rise dramatically, in Canadian dollar terms, in the last two months alone.

“We can do it!” she cried, welcoming the first trainloads of refugees into Munich as they were applauded onto the platforms by crowds, who wanted to show that Germany was different from Hungary and other eastern European states that had spurned this human tide.

That was September – but how quickly the mood seems to have soured, as Germany comes to terms with the realities involved in absorbing more than a million migrants who were promised a better life. Mrs Merkel has borne the brunt of the fallout. Her personal approval ratings hit a four-year-low this month, with Germany’s leading mass-market newspaper, Bild, posing a front-page question that seemed unthinkable only a year ago: “Is Merkel still the right one?”

Despite famine, religious wars, worldwide conflict and the spread of civilization, the heads of the Roman Catholic and the Russian Orthodox churches haven't spoken since the Great Schism of 1054 shattered Christendom, so they had a lot of catching up to do when they sat down for their historic meeting Friday afternoon in Cuba.

Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill embraced and kissed one another three times on the cheek as they met in the wood-paneled VIP room at Havana's José Martí International Airport. The two church leaders then proceeded to a pair of straight-backed chairs turned at angles. After another round of handshakes for the cameras and greetings with members of their entourages, the two men sat and began talking. Clasping their hands in their laps, both occasionally gestured and nodded as they spoke. They held a two-hour "personal conversation" and then signed a joint declaration.

"We are brothers," Francis said as he embraced Kirill in the small, wood-paneled VIP room of Havana's airport, where the three-hour encounter took place. "Now things are easier," Kirill agreed as he and the pope exchanged three kisses on the cheek. "This is the will of God," the pope said.

This time, however, it has the potential to be a conflagration for the history books. With a Supreme Court closely divided between five conservative justices and four liberal ones, every person on the bench is critical. Many of the most groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions of recent times have been decided by the slimmest of majorities. Justice Scalia, however, was more than just another court vote. He was also one of the chamber's most outspoken advocates for conservative jurisprudence. He was a towering voice for the doctrine of originalism - that the text of the Constitution is immutable and not open to "modern" interpretations.

His fiery dissents, such as in recent cases on gay marriage and the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform, served as rallying cries for conservatives across the US. Because Justice Scalia's death comes just 11 months before the end of Mr Obama's term as president, Republicans in the Senate are going to be under intense pressure from some conservatives to do everything they can to delay confirmation of a replacement until a new chief executive is sworn in on 20 January 2017.

That could involve slowing down confirmation hearings in the Senate committee and filibustering any nominee before they receive a vote in the full Senate. Then, conservatives hope, a Republican president would name a replacement more likely to maintain the one-vote conservative majority on the Court.

"Justice Scalia was an American hero," tweeted Texas Senator Ted Cruz. "We owe it to him, and the nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next president names his replacement."

In an opinion piece for Project-syndicate.org, the billionaire stated that “the best way to cause the disintegration of the Euro bloc is to flood the EU with Syrian refugees. There is no reason to believe that Putin intervened in Syria in order to aggravate the European refugee crisis,” Soros says. “But once Putin saw the opportunity to hasten the EU’s disintegration, he seized it. He has obfuscated his actions by talking of cooperating against a common enemy, ISIS [Islamic State/IS, also known as ISIL].”

According to Soros, “Putin’s Russia and the EU are engaged in a race against time: The question is which one will collapse first. The Putin regime faces bankruptcy in 2017, when a large part of its foreign debt matures, and political turmoil may erupt sooner than that.”

Soros speculates that the EU may be doomed to disintegrate due to its current problems: “Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent rescue packages for Greece, the EU has learned how to muddle through one crisis after another. But today it is confronted by five or six crises at the same time, which may prove to be too much. As Merkel correctly foresaw, the migration crisis has the potential to destroy the EU.”

"The number of conflicts, their victims, and their refugees" has been increasing worldwide, for the past five years and this development will "most likely continue this year." The journal, "Internationale Politik," substantiates this assumption by presenting an overview of the current wars. Today's deadliest wars - in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and South Sudan - are indeed a direct or indirect outcome of western hegemonic policies.

With its military interventions or subversive support for insurgents, this policy is aimed at provoking pro-western putsches or weakening non-compliant states. "Internationale Politik" assesses the possibility of conflicts in China's vicinity. During the years of China's rise, western powers were unsuccessful in knitting strong ties with the resource-rich Arab world, in view of the impending power struggle with the People's Republic of China. This power struggle is already emerging.

In a draft policy statement on “family engagement,” the two unconstitutional bureaucracies openly state their joint position: families are “equal partners” in everything from children's “development” and “education” to their “wellness across all settings.”

Virtually no area of family life, including the health and “mental health” of parents, as well as a family's “attitudes” and even its “housing,” would be free from government intrusion under the government's Orwellian vision. Even vague notions of “family wellness,” as defined by bureaucrats in Washington, DC, would be put under a government microscope. "Parenting interventions" will be used to ensure compliance.

“It is the position of the Departments [of HHS and Education] that all early childhood programs and schools recognize families as equal partners in improving children’s development, learning and wellness across all settings, and over the course of their children’s developmental and educational experiences,” reads the draft policy.

And it gets even more bizarre: As defined in the document, family means “all the people who play a role in a child’s life and interact with a child’s early childhood program or school.”

On June 9th 2015, Deutsche Banks holdings were downrated to BBB+, even lower than Lehman immediately prior to their collapse. And what makes all this so scary? Deutsche Bank’s derivatives holdings are the largest in the history of the planet. Even larger than JP Morgan’s by $5 trillion. We are talking $75 trillion, that is 20 times more than the entire GDP of Germany.

In other words, any major loss of confidence in the global stock market to which DB is exposed could result in an even larger recession than 2008. Given the fact that the percentage of GDP made up by this kind of financial speculation is even higher than pre-2008 in most western countries, it could result in global economic collapse. A write-down of this magnitude would imply that DB has a NEGATIVE net worth of 238 billion euros.

In other words, DB is technically insolvent. The bottom line: $600 trillion in gross notional derivatives backed by a tiny $600 billion in real assets: a whopping 0.1% margin requirement! Surely nothing can possibly go wrong with this amount of unprecedented 1000x systemic leverage.

We are too fragile, fiscally as well as psychologically. Our economies, cultures and polities are still paying a heavy price for the Great Recession; another collapse, especially were it to be accompanied by a fresh banking bailout by the taxpayer, would trigger a cataclysmic, uncontrollable backlash.

The public, whose faith in elites and the private sector was rattled after 2007-09, would simply not wear it. Its anger would be so explosive, so-all encompassing that it would threaten the very survival of free trade, of globalisation and of the market-based economy. There would be calls for wage and price controls, punitive, ultra-progressive taxes, a war on the City and arbitrary jail sentences.

For fear of allowing extremist or populist parties through the door, mainstream politicians would end up adopting much of this agenda, with devastating implications for our long-term prosperity. Central banks, in desperation, would embrace the purest form of money-printing: they would start giving consumers actual cash to spend, temporarily turbo-charging demand while destroying any remaining respect for the idea that money needs to be earned.

History never repeats itself exactly, but the last time a recession was met by pure, unadulterated populism was in the Thirties, when the Americans turned a stock market crash and a series of monetary policy blunders into a depression. President Herbert Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, dreamt up by two economically illiterate Republican senators, slapping massive taxes on the imports of 20,000 goods and triggering a global trade war. It was perhaps the most economically destructive piece of legislation ever devised, and it took until the Nineties before the damage was finally erased.

Foreign and defence ministers of the leading international states backing different factions in the war-torn country met in separate meetings in Munich and Brussels following the collapse of the latest round of peace talks. Both Russia and the United States demanded ceasefires in the long-running civil war so that the fight could be concentrated against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) - but each on their own, conflicting terms.

But the Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, staged their own intervention, saying they were committed to sending ground troops to the country. Their favoured rebel groups have been pulverised by Russian air raids and driven back on the ground by Iranian-supplied pro-regime troops. They said their declared target was Isil. But the presence of troops from Gulf states which have funded the Syrian rebels would be taken as a hostile act by the Assad regime and its backers, and a sign that they were committed to staking their claim to a say in the final Syrian settlement.

Russia issued a stark warning of the potential consequences. "The Americans and our Arab partners must think well: do they want a permanent war?" its prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, told Germany's Handelsblatt newspaper in an interview due to be published on Friday but released on Thursday night. “It would be impossible to win such a war quickly, especially in the Arab world, where everybody is fighting against everybody. All sides must be compelled to sit at the negotiating table instead of unleashing a new world war.”

Critics of Merkel’s policy became even more outspoken and angry after a string of sexual assaults that took place in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, most of which were committed by migrants. Several attempts have been made since then to instruct new arrivals on German etiquette, including the treatment of women. One of them, however, was mocked on Twitter, with jokes pointing out how it resembled an airline safety guide.

A German grandfather wasn’t joking at all, however, when he approached the mayor of his town, who happens to be a member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), earlier this month. When the concerned resident pointed out that the town’s schoolgirls were reporting being sexually harassed by residents of a refugee shelter and asked what could be done about it, the mayor said the answer was simple – the girls should take alternate routes to school which don’t require passing the shelter so as not to “provoke” the refugees. The response was met with outrage at a town hall meeting.

Residents have also been outraged by reports that refugees aren’t being arrested for crimes. A German police officer recently stated that law enforcement cannot take actions against law-breaking refugees without being accused of excessive violence or racism.

Despite this, there remains an extremely important story to tell, one that includes all the hallmarks of a literal police state including road blocks, road closures, check points, private mercenaries, papers please demands, and even guns pointed directly at the heads of law-abiding American citizens.

While one can imagine that the de facto martial law across Harney County may soon come to an end, (will it?!?) the fact remains that this happened in an American state, to American citizens and literally nothing is being said about it in the mainstream media or by the numerous FBI officials who keep telling the public that this was all for their own safety.

So there you have it. Oregon citizens were terrorized at gunpoint by armed thugs all in the name of protecting the people from citizens occupying a random wildlife refuge that literally never used violence on even one occasion.

Obviously there is vastly more to the story and the seemingly unimaginable response to the occupation of the wildlife refuge proves that the powers that be are indeed scared out of their minds that the American people will actually wake up in mass to their crimes and corruption.