But it is still worth considering what single issue could cause the world to change course. In my view, the most important place to watch in 2013 is Europe.

Taken as a single geographic entity, Europe has the largest economy in the world. Should it choose to do so, it could become a military rival to the United States. Europe is one of the pillars of the global system, and what happens to Europe is going to define how the world works. I would argue that in 2013 we will begin to get clarity on the future of Europe.

The side-effects of this currency warfare - or "beggar-thy-neighbour" policy as it was known in the 1930s - is an escalating leakage of monetary stimulus into the global system. So don’t fight the Fed, and never fight the world’s central banks on multiple fronts. Stock markets have already sensed this, up to a point, lifting Tokyo’s Nikkei by 23 per cent and Wall Street by 10 per cent since June.

The Bank of Japan is already boosting its assets by 7.5 per cent of GDP this year. It will have to do yet more to satisfy Mr Abe. If he means it, Japan is about to give us all a nuclear monetary shock. The Fed is no slouch either. It is printing $1 trillion in 2013, even though the money supply is already catching fire.

Europe chooses not to play because Germany controls the machinery, and Germany does not yet need help. So Europe will take it on the chin, and the Latin bloc will endure another year of slow asphyxiation. Yet I see little to disturb Europe’s grim status quo this year. The riots of 2013 will be just as ineffectual as the riots of 2012. Contraction will grind on. Germany's Wolfgang Schäuble will have his way... all to save a currency that is the elemental cause of the disaster in the first place, and should morally be broken into its democratically-controlled parts. There is no place for a monetary dictatorship in 21st Century Europe.

It was impossible to tell, from looking at a particular bank’s disclosures, whether it might suddenly implode. For the past four years, the nation’s political leaders and bankers have made enormous, in some cases unprecedented, efforts to save the financial industry, clean up the banks, and reform regulation in order to restore trust and confidence in the American financial system.

This hasn’t worked. Banks today are bigger and more opaque than ever, and they continue to behave in many of the same ways they did before the crash. One reason was that the firm’s huge commercial bank — the unit responsible for the old-line business of lending — looked safe, sound, and solidly profitable.

But then, in May, JPMorgan announced the financial equivalent of sudden cardiac arrest: a stunning loss initially estimated at $2 billion and later revised to $6 billion. It may yet grow larger; as of this writing, investigators are still struggling to comprehend the bank’s condition. The incident was about much more than money, however. Here was a bank generally considered to have the best risk-management operation in the business, and it had badly managed its risk. As the bank was coming clean, it revealed that it had fiddled with the way it measured its value at risk, without providing a clear reason.

Moreover, in acknowledging the losses, JPMorgan had to admit that its reported numbers were false. A major source of its supposedly reliable profits had in fact come from high-risk, poorly disclosed speculation!

The Family and Business Tax Cut Certainty Act of 2012, which passed through the Senate Finance Committee in August, was copied and pasted into the fiscal cliff legislation, yielding a victory for biotech companies, wind-turbine-makers, biodiesel producers, film studios - and their lobbyists. So, if you're wondering how algae subsidies became part of a must-pass package to avert the dreaded fiscal cliff, credit the Biotechnology Industry Organization's lobbying last summer.

Some tax lobbyists mostly ignored the August bill "because they thought it would be just a political document," one K Streeter told me. One lobbyist said he didn't worry too much about the Baucus bill because "we knew the House wasn't going to pass it."

So, this wasn't a case of lobbyists sneaking provisions into a huge package at the last minute. That probably wouldn't have been possible, many lobbyists told me Wednesday, because the workload in the past two weeks was too large and the political stakes were too high. "The legislators and the staff go underground when things get so intense," another Hill staffer-turned-lobbyist told me. "Nobody has time for a meeting. Nobody wants to talk about what's going on... The key is to plant the seed months in advance."

GE, Goldman Sachs, Diageo - they planted their seeds over the summer. They'll enjoy the fruit in the new year.

From soda to ketchup, many processed foods and beverages contain fructose, which affects the region of the brain that regulates appetite, according to a study by the Scientific American, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers measured the hypothalamus, which regulates hunger-related signals, of 20 healthy adult volunteers to study their responses to consuming sweetened beverages.

Upon receiving a 300-calorie drink sweetened with 75 grams of fructose, the volunteers had a more active hypothalamus and showed greater signs of hunger. When the volunteers received a similar drink that was instead sweetened using glucose, their hypothalamus was less active and the participants showed signs of fullness.

Drinking glucose “turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and the desire for food,” Yale University endocrinologist Dr Robert Sherwin, who was involved with the study, told the Associated Press. With fructose, “we don’t see those changes,” he added. “As a result, the desire to eat continues – it isn’t turned off.”

Glucose and fructose are metabolized differently, and the excessive use of fructose in American food staples is taking its toll. Even table sugar, which some incorrectly believe is made up solely of glucose, is half fructose. And the US uses lots of it.

Researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford found that out of 42 countries studied, the US has the highest per-capita consumption of high-fructose corn syrup. The US also has the highest obesity rate in the world, with more than one-third of adults (35.7 percent) being classified as ‘obese’ by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

After hearing of the bill’s passage, [Mr] Obama stated,

“Today’s agreement enshrines, I think, a principle into law that will remain in place as long as I am President: The deficit needs to be reduced in a way that’s balanced. Everyone pays their fair share. Everyone does their part. That’s how our economy works best. That’s how we grow.”

Welcome to [Mr] Obama’s “balanced approach”: Doublethink at its best.

For every dollar spent by government, an offsetting dollar is crowded out of the productive economy. While [Mr] Obama steadfastly refuses to cut government spending, his new mantra of “we can’t cut our way to prosperity” is the polar opposite of what needs to happen, namely, shrink the government so that the economy can expand. As long as government grows, the economy will shrink.

In short, nothing has been solved. [Mr] Obama and his spend-crazy Administration are not restrained in the least and the dividing lines between Democrats, Republicans and conservatives are more vitriolic than ever. This writer expects that the credit rating agencies will be inclined to further downgrade US debt...