Analysts have also said that Japan may want to play up East China Sea tensions to suppress the domestic opposition before its controversial security bill comes into effect in March. Responding to Japan’s warning, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Hong Lei said Tuesday that China’s resolve in upholding territorial sovereignty is unswerving when it comes to the Diaoyu Islands but urged Japan to exercise restraint.

“An escalation of tensions in the East China Sea is the last thing we want to see. We are willing to properly manage and settle the relevant issue through dialogue and consultations,” Hong said. The status-quo in the East China Sea has been controlled so far as both China and Japan have dispatched only coast guard vessels to patrol the area, a situation that will change once Japan dispatches military vessels, analysts said.

There was the miracle of the nineteen hijackers who defeated a multi-billion dollar air defense system with two-dollar box cutters — five of whom would later return from the grave. And then there was the miracle of a flight school dropout who, after accomplishing a 270-degree turn that pilots with 30 years of experience could not execute, maneuvered a commercial jetliner toward his target as though he were backing the family car into the garage.

There were miracles of passenger cell phones functioning at altitudes of 30,000 feet, well above their operational range; of a hijacker's intact passport found unscathed amidst pulverized debris at Ground Zero; of oxygen-starved, carbon-based office fires reaching temperatures hot enough to melt steel; and of the straight-down explosive collapse of two 110-story towers in less than a combined 20 seconds.

But these are only a fraction of the 9/11 miracles that, fully sanctioned by what purports to be a free and truth-seeking mainstream media, make up the essential fabric of an official narrative that has been used to eviscerate our Bill of Rights, steamroll Newton's laws of motion, and foment hatred, racism, and intolerance.

It's a tragic narrative that has allowed the soulless to wrest control of public policy from the sane and has commandeered hearts and minds of disillusioned youths in both America and abroad, luring them to fight and die in endless wars that feed the power-hungry aims and fill the bottomless pockets of tycoons, tyrants, and terrorists alike.

Here is the MPC on the remarkable gyrations of the markets since the start of the New Year: "Recent volatility in financial markets has underlined the downside risks to global growth, primarily emanating from emerging markets."

And on confidence in the economy: "Business surveys imply that the near-term outlook for aggregate [economic] activity is slightly weaker." And on the remarkable collapse of the oil price: "The 40% decline in oil prices means that the increase in inflation is now expected to be slightly more gradual in the near term." It all makes for a rather gloomy soup. Some would argue this pushes any interest rate rise into the relatively far future. And in this New Year of volatile markets, there is still plenty to add to the sense of global difficulty.

The credit rating agency, Standard and Poor's, brought out a new analysis this morning which makes for uncomfortable reading. It says that the debt levels of businesses - as well as governments - operating in emerging markets is rising rapidly up the risk register. In flashing red, the report says that businesses in Hong Kong and wider China have been borrowing heavily in the era of cheap global money.

"In terms of corporate debt, the very high borrowing of Chinese and Hong Kong corporates amid China's economic slowdown poses a prominent risk," Standard and Poor's says. And for a sober credit rating agency, that's pretty stark language. There's a frying pan - the global growth slowdown - and a fire - high levels of indebtedness - out there. The problem is, neither are very comfortable to stick around in.

The researchers drew data from over 1,800 different policy initiatives dating from 1981 to 2002. They concluded that wealthy, well-connected families are the ones who steer the direction of nearly everything politically in the United States.

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy,” they explain, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

The pair found that regardless of whether one is Republican or Democratic was of no significant difference. The results showed that more often than not, policy followed the interests of corporations and the 1%. The research notes recent Supreme Court decisions that allow more money in politics – pointing to this as a likely factor in this transformation into an oligarchy – stretching back to the 1980s.

Amid the ongoing crude carnage the province has seen soaring property crime, rising food bank usage and, sadly, elevated suicide rates, as Albertans struggle to comprehend how things up north could have gone south (so to speak) so quickly. The plunging loonie “can only serve to worsen the death of the 'Canadian Dream'" we said on Tuesday. As it turns out, we were right.

The currency's decline is having a pronounced effect on Canadians' grocery bills. As Bloomberg reminds us, Canada imports around 80% of its fresh fruits and vegetables. When the loonie slides, prices for those goods soar. "With lower-income households tending to spend a larger portion of income on food, this side effect of a soft currency brings them the most acute stress" Bloomberg continues.

Of course with the layoffs piling up, you can expect more households to fall into the "lower-income" category where they will have to fight to afford things like $3 cucumbers, $8 cauliflower, and $15 Frosted Flakes. As Bloomberg notes, James Price, director of Capital Markets Products at Richardson GMP, recently joked during an interview on BloombergTV Canada that "we're going to be paying a buck a banana pretty soon."

That one-two punch caused the Dow and S&P 500 to suffer their worst start to a trading year on record last week. The S&P 500's market valuation has plunged by $1.04 trillion since the end of 2015, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

To put that stunning figure in context, it's like wiping out the combined value of the following tech giants: Google ($508 billion), Facebook ($281 billion), Intel ($154 billion), Netflix ($50 billion) and Yahoo ($29 billion).

The Dow's market cap has plunged by $310 billion through Monday's close, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. That's equivalent to ExxonMobil ($309.5 billion) being erased from the index. No wonder there are lots of signs of rising fear on Wall Street.

CNNMoney's Fear & Greed Index is now flashing "extreme fear," a dramatic reversal from "neutral" just two weeks ago.

The Societe Generale (SocGen) analyst believes that the coming market “carnage is an indirect result of the failure of the [US] Fed’s quantitative easing”. He argued that investors would “reap the whirlwind” of central bank attempts to support their respective economies with looser monetary policy.

Mr Edwards believes that this coming collapse would result in a “trade war not unlike that in the 1930s”, mirroring the deflationary bust and trade war of the Great Depression era. “I realise most people think I am talking utter garbage but I'm used to that,” he added. His calls do not chime with mainstream economists, who believe that US GDP will rise by 2.6 percent this year.

Mr Edwards' contrarian forecasts come days after Andrew Roberts, an RBS analyst, published a research note warning clients to “sell everything except high quality bonds” on worries that 2016 would be a “cataclysmic year” for investors. Global disinflation could morph into global deflation this year, Mr Roberts said, as conditions appear “very dangerous for every investor in the world”.

This followed his announcement earlier this summer 2015 when fears over nebulous Federal intentions with operation "Jade Helm" were running high, that "to address concerns that Texas citizens and to ensure that Texas communities remain safe, secure, and informed about military procedures occurring in their vicinity, I am directing the state guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm 15."

Prior to this, Abbott was again in the news back in June when he signed a bill into law that would allow Texas to build a gold and silver bullion depository, which would allow Texas to repatriate $1 billion worth of bullion from the New York Fed to the new facility once completed.

In short: the Federal government and the state of Texas have been on a collision course of many months, one which culminated on Friday when Abbott called for a Constitutional Convention of states, spearheaded by Texas, and which would amend the US Constitution to wrest power from a federal government "run amok."

To achieve that, Abbott proposed nine amendments to "restore the Rule of Law and return the Constitution to its intended purpose."

• Prohibit Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one state.

• Require Congress to balance its budget.

• Prohibit administrative agencies from creating federal law.

• Prohibit administrative agencies from pre-empting state law.

• Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a US Supreme Court decision.

• Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for US Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law.

• Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution.

• Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds.

• Allow a two-thirds majority of the states to override a federal law or regulation.

Whether Abbott's proposal will gain steam and ultimately succeed is unknown, but it is virtually certain that the more the Obama administration governs via executive orders and other means to bypass the Legislative and short circuit the US government, the more powerful the grass-roots response at the state level will be, until eventually there is enough anger at the dysfunctional US government at the 34 required states to do precisely as the Texan wants... that, or Trump is voted into the Oval Office as a protest against everything that is broken with the current political status quo.

"Anyone claiming that America's economy is in decline is peddling fiction," Mr Obama told lawmakers in Washington. Republican presidential hopefuls attacked many of his assertions. And South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said in the party's official response his record "had fallen short of his soaring words".

How Republican presidential hopefuls saw it:

"The State Of The Union speech was one of the most boring, rambling and non-substantive I have heard in a long time," tweeted frontrunner Donald Trump.

For Ted Cruz the speech was "less a State of the Union and more a state of denial".

"While Isis is beheading people and burning them in cages he says climate change is our greatest threat," said Marco Rubio in a video response.

"Safer? Isis on the rise. North Korea testing nukes. Syria in chaos. Taliban on the march. This president is living in a different world," said Jeb Bush.