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...

The real problem the British people have had with the ‘European project’, as its insiders call it, is that they have never really begun to understand its real nature, and what was always intended to be its ultimate goal. The chief reason for this is that our politicians have never properly explained it to us. What makes this so much worse is that those who were most enthused by it, such as [Mr] Heath, knew full well what ‘the project’ was really about — the plan to weld all Europe together under an unprecedented form of super-government.

They deliberately decided to conceal it from us, for fear that our anxieties about our loss of sovereignty might prevent them from being allowed to join. [Mr] Heath got what he was after: entry to the club — although he still pretended that the Common Market was little more than a trading arrangement. On the day we entered, he told the British people on television that any fears that ‘we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty’ were ‘completely unjustified’.

The response of the EU’s leaders has been to call for yet ‘more Europe’, and a new treaty to force the eurozone members into ‘full political union’. This is now leaving Britain more obviously marginalised than ever, condemned to remain in the outer ring of a club, many members of which would now be only too pleased to see the back of us.

In 1973, as a junior member of [Mr] Heath’s Cabinet, Margaret Thatcher made all the approved noises about how wonderful it was for Britain to join this club. Once in office, however, she went on a painful learning curve, as she saw from the inside just what the real game was and how ruthlessly it was played. She was brought down in 1990 by an alliance of Europhiles in her party and their Brussels allies, because she was the last real obstacle to their Maastricht Treaty.

What really riled them was that she had seen through their true agenda and the disastrous course on which they were set. ‘That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European super-state was ever embarked on,’ wrote Lady Thatcher, ‘will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain... should ever have become part of it will appear a political error of the first magnitude.’