The downbeat sentiment contrasts with the end of 2017, when the country had just experienced a year of vibrant growth underpinned by robust domestic spending and flourishing global trade. Economic data have weakened significantly since then, with economists divided about whether they signal a slower but stable continuation of the expansion, or the start of a downturn.

A persistent shortage of skilled labor is also dampening growth prospects, with more than 92 percent of small and medium-sized enterprises having difficulty filling vacancies, the BVMW said. The group represents around 270,000 firms employing some nine million workers, according to its website.

“I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labeled ‘opinion makers’. Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol. The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice. It Is Not Working! These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible.”

The reason Lundell’s statement created such a buzz is because statins are big business. In the United States alone, about 25% of the population takes statin medications. They cost from as little as $53 per month to more than $600. Pfizer’s Lipitor went on sale in 1997 and its lifetime sales have surpassed $125 billion. AstraZeneca’s Crestor was the top-selling statin in 2013, generating $5.2 billion in revenue that year alone. The statin industry is estimated at around $30 billion in sales per year. Nevertheless, in the United States, more die each year of heart disease than ever before.

This was no ordinary Christmas market, but one hosted by Generation Identity, a far-right youth movement under observation by several European intelligence services. Part hippie, part hipster, the activists of Generation Identity are one result of a broad image makeover the far right has tried to give itself in recent years. Better dressed, better educated and less angry than the skinheads of old — at least in public — they see themselves on the front line of a counter-revolution fought by a loose but increasingly well-networked web of actors in politics, publishing, civil society and business who call themselves the “new right.”

Their aim: to bring down liberalism and rid Europe of non-European immigrants. The “new right” seeks to distance itself from the “old right,” which in Germany means neo-Nazis. Many analysts and officials consider this little more than clever rebranding. But they worry that it could allow groups like Generation Identity to act as a conduit between conservatism and extremism and draw young people into their orbit. “They have given extremism a friendly face,” said Stephan Kramer, the domestic intelligence chief of the east-central state of Thuringia.

“A deliberate infiltration of democratic institutions is taking place.” Despite having cleaned up their language, Mr von Notz said, “They are deeply anti-Democratic, often very anti-Semitic and openly racist.” “We don’t want to become minorities in our own countries,” said Alex Malenki, a 26-year-old business student from Saxony who posts video blogs on YouTube. "This is where liberalism has failed," Mr Kramer said.

“These people operate in the moral vacuum that has been left by our politicians,” he said. “Patriotism, community, identity - these are instinctive needs people have and that were denied them for a long time.” That some of their views can now be heard in Parliaments and on the street gives them a new quality. “The question is: Can we still stop it?” Mr Kramer said. “That’s a question that concerns our liberal democracy.”

Merkel has announced she won’t seek re-election in 2021 and it is clear she is attempting to push the globalist agenda to its disturbing conclusion before she stands down. French president Macron, whose lack of leadership is proving unable to deal with growing protests in France, told the Bundestag that France and Germany should be at the center of the emerging New World Order. “The Franco-German couple [has] the obligation not to let the world slip into chaos and to guide it on the road to peace”.

“Europe must be stronger… and win more sovereignty,” he went on to demand, just like Merkel, that EU member states surrender national sovereignty to Brussels over “foreign affairs, migration, and development” as well as giving “an increasing part of our budgets and even fiscal resources”.

In an interview with German news agency dpa, he stressed again that the UN's highest decision-making body, the Security Council, needs to be reformed to include more than the current five permanent members. He says the current composition of the council was "outdated." "I think the balance of power in the world needs to be reflected much more adequately than is currently the case," he told dpa, insisting that Germany should hold a permanent seat.

The UN Security Council currently has five members, the US, the UK, France, China and Russia. Germany, along with Brazil, Japan and India have been pushing for an expansion of the UN body for years.

But a senior US official has told how America is “waking up” to the prospect of the UK leaving the economic bloc – and the future implications of Britain crashing out the EU without a deal would have on the US economy. US Lawmakers working in conjunction with their UK counterparts are worried about transatlantic partnerships being broken.

Washington relies heavily on London as a pathway to Brussels on a range of issues such as intelligence, security, trade and financial services. The senior US policy aide told POLITICO: “Like everything, you start to pay attention when you finally get close to crisis. "And we’re finally starting to get close to crisis. So, people are now paying attention more.

“People are listening, the problem is no-one here really knows what to do. Christopher Giancarlo, chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, warned back in October: “We’re concerned that a hard Brexit would have an immediate and significant impact on the global financial system, including US banks, which account for between 40 to 60 percent of activity in the global derivatives markets.”

This growth will push centrist forces, which have historically led the European Parliament, aside. Mr Macron’s La République en Marche party will likely end up second among the French forces in Brussels. And Italy’s Democratic Party, which in 2014 gathered an astonishing 40.82 percent, will continue plunging in popularity after the major defeat suffered at the 2018 Italian election, according to political analysts.

While a study conducted by the Jacques Delors Institute, a Paris-based think-tank, suggests populist forces across Europe are unlikely to win the majority of the 705 seats, a gain will help them influence politics in Brussels.

On Thursday, the Dow was already down several hundred points when I went out to do some grocery shopping with my wife, and at the low point of the day it had fallen 611 points. But then a “miracle happened” and the Dow ended the day with an increase of 260 points. As I detailed yesterday, this is precisely the sort of behavior that you would expect during a chaotic bear market.

As Fox Business has noted, bear market rallies are typically “sharp, quick and usually short”. I figured that the momentum from Wednesday would carry over into the early portion of Thursday, so I was surprised when the Dow was down by so much as we neared the middle of the day. But then around 2 PM we witnessed an extraordinary market surge…

The Dow Jones Industrial Average posted a 865-point swing in less than two hours. The blue-chip index had been down in mid-afternoon more than 500 points to cut the previous session’s gains in half, before bargain hunters and short covering turned a big decline into a modest gain. An 865 point swing in less than two hours is not “normal”.

In fact, it is about as far from “normal” as you can get. The inevitable consequences for decades of exceedingly foolish decisions are starting to roll in, and the bursting of “The Bubble To End All Bubbles” is going to be beyond excruciating.

People living in the towns of Hadera, Caesarea, Or Akiva, Zichon Yacov and Binyamina reported that their houses shook under the blast and for many hours the air reeked of gunpowder. A quarter of a million Israeli civilians were affected. That would be a mild foretaste of what is to come if the Russians carry out their threat of payback for any more Israeli air strikes over Syria. And that was a single SA-5 missile. The impact of five or 10 fired by a Syrian battery does not bear thinking of.