Earlier today, the Israeli Defense Forces (who have been quite active on Twitter) put out a tweet commemorating the famed Yom Kippur war of 1973, in which Israel bombed Syria: Oct. 10 #YomKippur73: Israel Air Force bombards airports in Syria to prevent Soviet weapons reaching the Syrian Army http://t.co/tKnMzYjgFF— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) October 10, 2013

The tweet may have been somewhat ill-timed, and poorly thought-out, given the current "heightened tensions" with Syria. Either way, apparently some oil traders either skipped over or didn't understand the hashtag reference to "YomKippur73" (and the reference to the Soviet Union - a country that hasn't existed in decades) and interpreted the tweet to mean that Israel was bombing Syria today. And, in response they started bidding up the price of oil. Because twitchy commodities dealers apparently do their pricing based on tweets.

Of course, the article notes that traders eventually realized their mistake... but the price of oil stayed up, rising over a dollar from $110.40 a barrel to $111.50 a barrel, and then continuing to rise a bit (though more slowly) after the mistake was understood. Isn't it great that key pieces of the global economy can change based on some people totally misreading a tweet? Makes me feel so comfortable about the state of the world today.

In the five years before the 2008 crash, only 10 banks failed in the United States. Let me repeat that: ten banks went belly up in the entire period between January 2003 through December 2007.

Since January 2008 through today, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation shows 487 banks have failed, with 22 failures just so far this year. With an average of two bank failures per year in the five years before the crash, that means banks are still failing at 10 times the pre-crash rate. But the numbers get worse from there.

While the FDIC shows 487 banks have failed, other data at the FDIC show that a total of 1,306 banks have disappeared since March 31, 2009, along with $1.5 trillion in deposits. The difference is that 819 banks or savings associations have merged, typically to survive.

Complete and utter incompetence on the part of the government drones in California. So these idiots have been under-reporting for a month? None of the government furloughs are included in these numbers. The MSM won’t tell you that the economy is in recession and companies have begun to lay off people due to poor sales and the Obamacare debacle. Retail and restaurant sales are collapsing.

The average American is barely getting by on their low wage part time jobs. Now Obamacare has arrived to crush whatever momentum the economy had. Claims will be headed higher as the recession deepens.

Republicans will meet Mr Obama, who is a Democrat, later on Thursday. Officials have warned the US risks default on 17 October if the nation's borrowing limit is not increased.

Mr Boehner told reporters on Thursday: "What we want to do is to offer the president today the ability to move a temporary increase in the debt ceiling in agreement to go to conference on the budget for his willingness to sit down and discuss with us a way forward to reopen the government."

"It's time for leadership," the Ohio Republican said. "It's time for these negotiations and this conversation to begin."

Ms Yellen said if confirmed by the Senate she would do her utmost "to promote maximum employment, stable prices and a stable financial system". She said more needed to be done to strengthen the US economy although progress had been made recently. The president praised Ms Yellen's ability to build consensus and listen to competing views.

He added that she was "committed to increasing employment and understands the human costs when Americans can't find a job". If the nomination is confirmed by the US Senate, Ms Yellen, 67, would replace Ben Bernanke, who has held the post for eight years. She has been his deputy for the past two years, and would become the first woman to head the Federal Reserve.

The Fed will be looser for longer. The FOMC will continue to print money until the US economy creates enough jobs to reignite wage pressures and inflation, regardless of asset bubbles, or collateral damage along the way. No Fed chief in history has been better qualified. She is a glaring contrast to Alan Greenspan, a political speech writer for Richard Nixon, who never earned a real PhD (it was honorary) or penned an economic paper of depth.

She has pedigree. Her husband is Nobel laureate George Akerlof, the scourge of efficient markets theory. She co-authored "Market for Lemons", the paper that won the prize.

So there we have it. The next chairman of the Fed is going to track the labour participation rate. Money will stay loose. Markets have been spared again. The Brics can breathe easier. This leaves me deeply uneasy. We are surely past the point where we can keep using QE to pump up asset prices.

Yet curiously, even though the US government’s completely ridiculous, untenable fiscal situation is a front page embarrassment for the entire world to see, markets have barely budged. Stocks and bonds haven’t moved because nobody cares what’s happening in the US government anymore. And that’s because every serious investor understands that the US government long since abdicated any economic power to the banking sector.

Everyone knows that the Fed is going to keep printing money, ergo they’re going to keep sending markets higher. The US government and the incompetent elected officials are just giant stooges in this deeply flawed monetary system.

And this debt ceiling charade only proves it. The secret is out there in the open. And now it’s completely obvious who’s really in charge.

Shadow banking loans are estimated to have reached $15 trillion in the US. And among them is a particularly hot category: lending to highly leveraged companies with junk credit ratings. Sophisticated investors with a big appetite for risk who know how much yield to demand to compensate them for these risks might see these “leveraged loans” as an opportunity. But the NY Fed found that these loans are increasingly issued in a loosey-goosey manner, with low underwriting standards. And issuance has soared.

In 2007, issuance of these “leveraged loans” peaked at $680 billion but then totally collapsed in 2008. Since 2009, according to NY Fed, “it has rebounded very quickly, and is now at record levels of volume, projected to be larger than $1 trillion in 2013.”

A dozen nearly new C-27J Spartans from Ohio and elsewhere have already been taken out of service and shipped to the so-called boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Five more are expected to be built by April 2014, all of which are headed to the boneyard unless another use for them is found.

The Air Force has spent $567 million on 21 C-27J aircraft since 2007, according to purchasing officials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Sixteen had been delivered by the end of September.

The Air Force almost had to buy more of the planes against its will, the newspaper found. A solicitation issued from Wright-Patterson in May sought vendors to build more C-27Js, citing Congressional language requiring the military to spend money budgeted for the planes, despite Pentagon protests.

When asked by the public, the agency is notifying beneficiaries that “Unlike a federal shutdown which has no impact on the payment of Social Security benefits, failure to raise the debt ceiling puts Social Security benefits at risk,” according to a person familiar with the agency directive.

The warning was assembled after the agency consulted with the Treasury Department, which would play a lead role in determining how the government handles payments if the borrowing limit isn’t raised soon.

Its first role following WWII was the establishment of the German Army during the Korean War and joined NATO in 1955 soon after Stalin’s death and the armistice in the Korean War. The new army met widespread public protests of “Ohne Mich” (Without me) public sentiment. Opposition to the formation of Bundeswehr, a critical problem for a conscription army, was widespread; protestors disrupted swearing-in ceremonies and domestic terrorists attacked both the German and American military forces, especially during the Vietnam War. In the end, the argument that every country has an army, either its own or a foreign one was accepted.

Its second mission, at the end of the 1989 democratic revolution and the unification of Germany, the country had two armies, and General Joerg Schoenbohm was charged with forging a single Bundeswehr out of the existing West German Bundeswehr, and what once was the East-German National Volksarmee, while Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President George H W Bush negotiated with President Mikhail Gorbachev to allow the united Germany to remain in NATO.

Now in its Third incarnation, NATO and the German Army now must define a new common purpose to meet a challenging international environment: One that meets the US pivot to Asia to deal with the rise of China that has shifted the geopolitical role of the United States; the withdrawal of the US permanently stationed Forces in Europe, and the many 21st century borderless threats. These changes call for re-thinking the role the Bundeswehr plays in NATO.

But not even we thought that a banking sector "bail in", in which unsecured bank liabilities, which include bonds and of course deposits, are used as a matched source of extinguishment of non-performing bad debt "assets" could spread to the broader economy, and specifically to unencumbered private sector assets.

Alas, this is precisely what Greece, which is desperately trying to delay the inevitable and announce it needs not only a third but fourth bailout, appears keen on doing.

As Kathimerini reports, the Greek Labor and Social Insurance Ministry is "seriously considering drastic measures in order to obtain the social security contributions owed by enterprises and to avoid having to slash pensions and benefits." What drastic measures? "The ministry is planning to force companies to pay up or face having their assets seized, so that the 14 billion euros of contributions due can be recouped." After all, it's only "fair."

In the last week Germany’s president Joachim Gauck has called on the country to take more responsibility in the international arena and told the Germans: “Our country is not an island.” Meanwhile, troops have handed over a key base in Afghanistan as the country withdraws from a conflict which has already claimed 54 German lives.

This week both Syria and Iran have also looked to Germany to help solve their disputes with the West. But is it time for Germany to step up on the global stage? At an event at the US Embassy in Berlin on Monday The Local asked US author and foreign policy expert Professor Walter Russell Mead for his view.

On the subject of Europe and the Eurozone, Professor Mead, who now lectures at Bard College in New York State, urged Germany to lead a Holy Roman Empire rather than a Prussian conquest. “Any discussion of Germany’s world role must begin with Europe,” he told reporters. “The battle over the Euro is a really fundamental one. It looks to me that everyone is at fault – German banks, German regulators, and German politicians."

He added the country’s politicians were “terrified of admitting” the precarious financial position of German banks which had lost billions in loans and investments to southern Europe. “Germany has been squeezing southern Europe not to punish vice but to protect vice,” he said. Meanwhile, he described the north-versus-south Europe debate as a struggle between “two sinners in a dispute about who is the saint.”

But will debt-ridden countries like Italy have to adopt German austerity for the Eurozone to survive. Professor Mead called for Germany to lead a Holy Roman Empire in Europe – a loose federation of states - instead of aggressively imposing austerity. “Europe is hard to lead. It is resistant to leadership,” he said. “It has so many different priorities."

"Are you going to have a King of Prussia or the Holy Roman Emperor? The Holy Roman Emperor is the more sustainable. It is the least work of the two”.

On the occasion of this year's national holiday, last week, German President Joachim Gauck claimed that more and more "voices" in Germany and abroad are demanding that his country should play "a stronger role in Europe and the world." Germany is "not an island" and should not "belittle" itself in the future, after all, it is the "fourth largest economic power in the world."

As his source of inspiration, he also named the Polish foreign minister, who had called for "German leadership" already in late 2011, and a prominent transatlantic publicist, who had recently called on Berlin to act "more resolutely" in the EU following the elections. Gauck's offensive had been carefully prepared in the foreign policy establishment. Whereas sectors of the elite in other EU countries condone German "leadership," large majorities of the populations in the southern EU countries are criticizing German predominance.

The intra-European power struggles are continuing. Already a few months ago, Luxemburg's Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker had warned that he can see similarities to the period leading up to World War I.

Since 2006, we had identified the period 2011-2013 as that during which the “Dollar Wall” on which the power of the United States sits would fall apart. Summer 2011, with the cut in the United States’ credit rating by S&P, marked an historic turning point and confirmed that the “impossible” was indeed in the process of coming true. Therefore today, it seems essential to provide our subscribers with a clear anticipatory vision of what awaits the “pillar” of the world before the crisis at the point when the crisis moved into “top gear” in summer 2011.

Thus, according to LEAP/E2020, the 2012 election year, which opens against the backdrop of economic and social depression, complete paralysis of the federal system, strong rejection of the traditional two-party system and a growing questioning of the relevance of the Constitution, inaugurates a crucial period in the history of the United States. Over the next four years, the country will be subjected to political, economic, financial and social upheaval such as it has not known since the end of the Civil War which, by an accident of history, started exactly 150 years ago in 1861.

During this period, the US will be simultaneously insolvent and ungovernable, turning that which was the “flagship” of the world in recent decades into a “drunken boat”.