Rare positive news has come out of the Ukraine war on Tuesday, the last day of 2024. Russia and Ukraine have exchanged hundreds of prisoners in a deal brokered the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Russia’s defense ministry has confirmed it swapped 150 Ukrainian POWs for the same number of Russian troops. However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy has said that 189 Ukrainians had returned home as a result. It’s unclear why there is a discrepancy in the numbers.

“The return of our people from Russian captivity is always very good news for each of us. And today is one of such days: our team managed to bring 189 Ukrainians home,” Zelensky announced on Telegram.

Among the released included “defenders of Azovstal and Mariupol” – according to his words. Zelensky has vowed to “continue working to free every single person from Russian captivity.

“This is our goal, and we will not forget anyone. I thank the team that is doing everything to bring our people home,” he continued. 

On the Russian side, a video posted the country’s human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova featured freed soldiers receiving care and aid.

“Very soon our guys will hug their families and friends and celebrate the New Year on their native land,” she said.

According to one summary of the number of successful prisoner exchanges since the war’s start, and after nearly three years:

There have been 60 different prisoner exchanges since the war began in February 2022. The last exchange took place in mid-October when the two countries swapped 95 POWs each.

Ukraine said on Monday that Moscow had released a total of 3,956 people – soldiers and civilians – in deals with Kyiv since the start of the conflict. Zelenskyy promised to continue pushing for the remaining POWs to be freed.

This new large-scale swap also confirms that both sides are at least keeping up negotiations or some level of communications indirectly, via third party mediating countries. Zelensky has consistently refused to enter any negotiations which would result in Ukraine ceding territory; however, Ukraine is having a severe manpower and ammo shortage crisis.

Russia and Ukraine conducted a prisoner swap, bringing home over 300 captives. The swap, mediated by the United Arab Emirates and others, is the 59th exchange since Feb. 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine https://t.co/RUWa68YvGr pic.twitter.com/GDhB8YTcnY

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 31, 2024

Because of this, most analysts see an eventual negotiated settlement as inevitable. But Kiev wants better leverage, and is still holding out hopes of receiving more defense funding and advanced weaponry from the West via Biden’s ongoing ‘surge’ before Trump takes office.

Authored by Jacob Burg via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Ground observers across an increasing number of U.S. states are reporting aircraft in the sky that appear to be unmanned aerial systems (UAS), or drones, leaving the public on edge.

With no definitive answers available, aviation experts—perplexed by the federal government’s limited response—suggest multiple origins for the unidentified aircraft.

During weeks of sightings pooling out of states such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, California, Ohio, and Utah, some observers reported seeing aircraft as large as SUVs.

Now, state and local officials are demanding answers from Washington.

A Dec. 17 joint statement released by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Department of Defense confirmed more than 5,000 reported drone sightings in the past few weeks, “with approximately 100 leads generated.”

These reports consist of a “combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones” with nothing yet identified as anomalous, the government wrote, denying any national security or public safety risk.

The Epoch Times reached out to commercial pilots, aviation safety experts, and a leading counter-UAS company, who said that not only do these purported drones present a serious public safety and national security risk, but also, they may be privately owned, U.S. military assets, or weapons of foreign adversaries.

Shawn Pruchnicki, an aviation safety expert and assistant professor at Ohio State University’s Center for Aviation Studies, told The Epoch Times that until one of the aerial objects is brought down and further analyzed, no one can be sure whether all sightings are of actual drones or UAS and not other unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

“I think one of the problems is that individuals, the government … the way the media is talking, is they’re already being labeled as drones. The term drones is a specific description of a certain type of vehicle, and that already is an explanation,” Pruchnicki said.

“Technically, they’re UAPs. We don’t know what they are.”

Even before reports of purported drones began coming out of New Jersey in November, ground observers had reported large numbers of unidentified aircraft that appeared to be drones over the past several years.

One drone swarm bearing a striking similarity to the current one was reported in 2020 over Colorado and Nebraska, including near a storage site for some of the United States’ Minuteman III nuclear missiles.

Although the FBI and FAA never identified who was operating those aircraft, the federal government suggested that the reports could be attributed to hobby drones and misidentified planets and stars.

There was also reportedly an unidentified drone incursion in the restricted airspace around Langley Air Force Base in Virginia throughout several nights in 2023.

The aircraft flew in formation and included fixed-wing drones and quadcopters.

In January, Shi Fengyun, a Chinese student at the University of Minnesota, was arrested in California before boarding a one-way flight to China. In July, Shi pleaded guilty to flying a drone to photograph U.S. military vessels over a classified naval installation in Norfolk, Virginia.

In December, federal authorities arrested Chinese citizen Yinpiao Zhou, 39, of Brentwood, California, as he was preparing to board a flight to China. Zhou allegedly flew a drone over and took photos of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The alleged incident took place on Nov. 30, and federal agents found several aerial photographs of the base after searching Zhou’s drone.

Mary-Lou Smulders, chief marketing officer at Dedrone, one of the largest airspace security and counter-UAS firms in the world, contracting with 32 different countries, told The Epoch Times that her company has tracked more than 1 million drone violations over U.S. airspace in the past year alone.

That amounts to roughly 1,000 daily.

“I think the real overarching hidden message here is it’s happening every single day, and not just three or four a day, but over 1,000 a day,” Smulders said.

“And to date, despite bipartisan efforts, the government hasn’t done what they really need to do.”

Drones Flouting FAA Regulations

More than 700,000 of the year-to-date drone violations tracked by Dedrone involved drones flying at elevations higher than 400 feet, which is a violation of FAA regulations.

The FAA states that drones may not fly higher than 400 feet above ground unless they are flown within a 400-foot radius of a structure, and then cannot fly higher than 400 feet beyond that “structure’s immediate uppermost limit.”

Drones must also be “flown within the visual line of sight of the person operating the aircraft” and must weigh less than 55 pounds unless the operator has special approval from the FAA for specific use situations.

“Many of these drone sightings … appear to be these larger drones operating autonomously. So they are not working within line of sight. They are instead following a pre-programmed GPS flight plan,” Juan Browne, a commercial pilot for one of the major U.S. airlines, told The Epoch Times.

“That’s not legal. … unless somebody knows about it and has approved it.”

Browne explained that larger drones are usually “too big and too expensive” to be hobbyist drones and are rated as commercial aircraft, which are sometimes used in the agricultural industry or for carrying Hollywood-style cameras.

Drone operators must also comply with all airspace and flight restrictions, including “special use airspace designation and temporary flight restrictions,” government regulations state.

The purported drones flying near and around airports in the northeast are flouting FAA regulations.

The FAA has also recently introduced a new tracking system for drones called remote identification, which is the “ability of a drone in flight to provide identification and location information that can be received by other parties through a broadcast signal” through Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

Generally, any drones that are required to be registered, “including those flown for recreation, business, or public safety,” must use remote ID unless explicitly flown within line of sight of the operator in a special FAA-Recognized Identification Area (FRIA).

FRIAs are defined geographical areas where drones without remote ID can be flown legally.

One pilot for a commercial airline who asked to remain anonymous told The Epoch Times that if Air Traffic Control (ATC) can’t track or locate these drone operators, they’re likely defying the FAA’s remote ID rules.

“[Remote ID] is a way of telling air traffic control and other aircraft that you’re out there. ‘I’m at this altitude for collision avoidance purposes.’ Clearly, that’s not being complied with because ATC doesn’t know anything about it,” he said.

“So if you have large drones in airspace that they shouldn’t be in, and ATC doesn’t know about it, it’s an illegal operation.”

However, remote ID does not always work so easily, according to Browne.

Read the rest here…

One might assume that political turmoil in South Korea would subside, at least temporarily for a week of mourning, following the tragic crash of Jeju Air Flight 2216 on Sunday, which claimed the lives of all but two of the 181 people onboard. 

However, that is not the case, as Seoul Western District Court issued an arrest warrant for impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol following a request by the Joint Investigation Headquarters. The embattled South Korean leader refused to cooperate with investigators amid a criminal probe for insurrection allegations. 

“The arrest warrant and search warrant for President Yoon Suk Yeol, requested by the Joint Investigation Headquarters, were issued this morning,” the Joint Investigation Headquarters, which includes officials from the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials, wrote in a statement.

Bloomberg noted, “If the warrant is executed, Yoon would be the first sitting president in South Korea’s history to be arrested,” adding, “It’s unclear if investigators will manage to take the president into custody as a previous attempt to search the presidential office was blocked by Yoon’s team.” 

Yoon’s refusal to cooperate with the criminal investigation into his martial law order prompted the issuance of the arrest warrant, according to The Guardian, citing an official from the Corruption Investigation Office.

“The reason for the warrant is that there is a concern that the individual may refuse to comply with summons without justifiable reasons, and there is sufficient probable cause to suspect the commission of a crime,” the official continued.

Yonhap News said the arrest warrant is valid through January 6. Other South Korean media outlets have speculated that the odds of Yoon’s arrest are low. 

According to Park Sung-min, president of the Seoul-based political consulting firm MIN Consulting, the arrest warrant will likely pressure Yoon to cooperate with the criminal investigation. 

Yonhap cited the acting leader of South Korea’s ruling People Power party, Kweon Seong-dong, who said the arrest warrant and search warrant for the sitting president was inappropriate. 

Meanwhile, the constitutional court has six months to decide whether to confirm the impeachment or reinstate Yoon. 

Goldman analysts outlined the possible transition scenarios for Yoon: 

South Korea also faces protectionist policies from the incoming Trump administration while continuing to face nuclear threats from its northern neighbor. The crises are mounting for Asia’s fourth-biggest economy.

Authored by Jeremy Frankel via American Greatness,

We did it.

The greatest comeback in political history, President Donald Trump taking back the office he held four years ago, is historic and nothing short of remarkable. The message it sends is that “Make America Great Again,” the MAGA movement, is here to stay. Long gone are the days of the old GOP establishment, the controlled opposition that had no problem managing the decline of the nation along with the Democrats. Now, Americans are no longer the forgotten men and women. We are ascendant, and we must make sure that our party will continue this path for the foreseeable future.

As such, we must capitalize on the MAGA mandate and make sure the Trump agenda is carried out as best as possible. Below are some ideas that President Trump can either enact on his own or work toward from the moment he assumes office.

1. Pardon ALL January 6-ers.

Every single person caught up in Stasi-like witch hunts has been either wrongfully charged or overcharged, and their lives have been ruined by the Biden DOJ, FBI, and the DC courts in an operation that would make Stalin jealous. Many of the J6 defendants have languished in the prison colloquially known as the DC gulag, have been bankrupted, and have had their lives destroyed, all clearly for opposing the left and the Democrat Party. The two-tiered justice system needs to end, once and for all. Every one of them needs to be pardoned and given reinstitution to at least help undo the damage done to them and their families. Especially after seeing how leftists treated their own rioters during the summer of 2020 after they burned down American cities.

2. Fire every potential holdover from the Biden administration and replace them with MAGA supporters.

All employees, from White House staff to low-level staffers in random departments, need to be Trump’s own. We saw last time how holdovers from the Obama administration did whatever they could to take President Trump down. We also saw “Republicans” last time around turn on the President and block his initiatives. Schedule F should be enacted immediately to begin to rein in the bureaucracy and drain the swamp.

3. Secure the border, deport as many illegal aliens as possible, and end birthright citizenship.

The Biden regime purposefully destroyed any semblance of border security by halting the building of the wall, inviting wave after wave of illegal immigration from virtually all over the world, and removing any incentives for them to leave. Worse, we know that thousands of them—at the very least—are part of criminal gangs, which have made Americans unable to walk the streets in their own towns for fear of their lives. The number of new illegal aliens is estimated to be around 20 million, and if they are not deported, they will inevitably blend into American society, and this will become the new normal. They will likely also be counted in the census, which almost certainly will tilt the number of electoral votes to the Democrats, who want nothing more than to make them citizens and, in turn, Democrat voters.

4. Defund NPR, PBS, and Planned Parenthood.

There is no reason whatsoever for a subsidized news network to exist. Needless to say, NPR and PBS always lean left, which is to be expected since that’s what keeps them in existence. Planned Parenthood also should entirely be cut off, since, aside from the wickedness of its promotion of abortion, it is a major fundraiser for Democrats.

5. Implement nationwide election integrity measures.

Every federal, state, and local election should have a uniform voting system where all elections are simple, conducted with paper, and counted on election night. Early voting and voting by mail should be minimized—if not outright banned. Schemes such as ranked-choice voting, where the main goal is really to keep establishment politicians in power forever, should be banned nationwide as well. The deadline for election night counting must be enshrined to preempt any “finding” votes to conveniently get the Democrat to win. And it clearly is a federal issue, since many of these races conducted by states are for federal office. There must be a uniform system if we want our country to have any semblance of election integrity. The SAVE Act, which would require states to obtain proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to take non-citizens off the voter rolls, should be looked at as well.

6. Let Israel defeat its enemies and refer to the “West Bank” as Judea and Samaria.

Israel should know that the US will stand up for good and stand up to evil. This means boldly stating that Israel not only has the right to defend itself, which is obvious, but also that it should do whatever it has to do to secure its safety, no matter what that looks like. The U.S. should also take the lead in recognizing the West Bank as part of Israel and officially renaming it by its true title, Judea and Samaria. This may also include withdrawing from the terrorist-supporting UN and sanctioning the International Criminal Court (ICC) for its blatant antisemitism.

7. Deport college campus rioters and terror supporters and defund any campus that tolerates it.

There is no reason we, as a country, must accept our elite institutions supporting our country’s downfall, whether it is by allowing antisemitic rioters to make life on campus impossible for Jews or Marxist professors spewing anti-American bile. The endowments of these institutions should be taxed as much as possible, and any other incentives to force the schools to expel such students or fire such professors should be utilized. If any of these rioters are on student visas, they should be instantly revoked, and they should be deported immediately. The Executive Order on Combatting Anti-Semitism that the Trump administration enacted in 2019 should be codified into law as well.

8. Restart Keystone and ANWR and reverse every Biden executive order on drilling and fracking.

One of Joe Biden’s first actions when he assumed the presidency four years ago was to stop the Keystone pipeline, which was a major factor in causing energy prices to skyrocket. Trump should immediately take steps to continue the project and, if need be, expand more drilling wherever possible. The leases for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) should be immediately reinstated as well. This will help to bring down prices in other areas since energy is necessary for the production of all goods and services. We should aim to be, as Trump talks about often, “energy dominant.”

9. Make the Trump tax cuts permanent.

Trump should champion the tax cuts that were passed during his first term and work with the Republican House and Senate to make them permanent. This will help with inflation as well. Families will have more money in their wallets, and companies will have more money to produce more, leading to lower prices and higher wages.

10. Get wokeness out of the military.

The American military is meant to be an example of strength to the world, not a leftist social experiment. Under Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense must root out every bit of Critical Race Theory, gender theory, and any other woke, noxious garbage out of the military. There is a reason morale is low and recruitment rates continue to drop, and the world’s force for good, the American military, must be allowed to resume its true mission.

11. Repeal of the Home Rule Act.

The Home Rule Act, passed in 1973, gave Washington, D.C., autonomy and created a city government to control local affairs. The city is extremely dangerous and crime-ridden, but the rate of prosecution is very low, and there’s a good chance anyone arrested will be released to commit more crimes. The city council and mayor refuse to address this, and, according to the Constitution, control of D.C. should be with Congress regardless. The Seat of Government Act, which was introduced in the House in 2023, should be revisited.

12. Constitutional amendments that cap the Supreme Court at nine justices and enshrine the Senate filibuster.

The constant Democrat threat of “packing” or “reimagining” the Supreme Court needs to finally end, as well as the threat of abolishing the 60-vote threshold in the Senate to pass any legislation they want. Two constitutional amendments, one to enshrine the number of justices on the Supreme Court and another to make the filibuster permanent, should be pushed, and everyone who supports or opposes it should be on record. The left cannot be allowed to continue holding the country hostage this way.

13. Expand the Abraham Accords.

Israel and its neighbors can find peace with each other. The Abraham Accords are a perfect example of how that is to be done, where Israel can stand up for its rights and isn’t pushed to capitulate to the terrorists who want nothing more than to destroy Israel and commit a second Holocaust. And many of the countries in the region, as we’ve seen, respect this. The Middle East can be a peaceful place if the circumstances are right and the good actors remain strong.

14. Lawfare must end—with equal justice.

The twisting of the justice system by the Democrat Party and its apparatchiks in the form of “judges” in recent years is unprecedented, and the only way to stop it is by making sure they know what it’s like—of course not to invent crimes just to try to convict someone, as they did, but if there is any real reason to believe that anyone on their side broke the law in any way, there is no reason to hold back. That’s not retribution; it’s true blind justice, true equal justice under the law.

15. The FACE Act must be repealed.

The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or the FACE Act, has been severely abused and weaponized by the left to the point of going after pro-lifers just because of their activism. The endgame is clearly to quash dissent, and we need to take away every tool they have.

16. Ban “gender-affirming care” for minors.

There is little, if not nothing, more heinous than child abuse, and mutilation in the name of the concept of magically changing a kid’s gender is something that no civilized society should allow. There must be a law outright banning it, with significant prison time for everyone involved. Child abuse is illegal in every state, and this hideous act is clear abuse.

17. Solidify the true meaning of Title IX.

Leftists have been doing their best to reinterpret the law against discrimination based on sex to include “gender identity,” which would let men into women’s sports, bathrooms, and any other segregated space. We’ve seen how dangerous this is to women, but the left doesn’t care at all. The law must be rewritten so no Marxist judge can redefine it.

18. Restart the 1776 Commission and defund any district that teaches CRT or trans theory.

Our public schools should be raising the next generation to love their country and mold them to be ready for the real world. The 1776 Commission was meant to counter the poisonous nonsense, such as Critical Race Theory or transgender theory, that most of the country’s school districts push, with the goal of educating students with a sense of patriotism and love of country. It should immediately be restarted. No teacher or school administrator should be allowed to be able to indoctrinate their students with toxic garbage like the aforementioned, and any school that does this should be defunded. The idea of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), which is essentially a Marxist worldview disguised as tolerance, should be dismantled as well.

19. Automatic death penalty for certain crimes.

A law should be pushed for an automatic death penalty for certain heinous crimes, including murdering a police officer, trafficking humans or drugs, or molesting children. There should be no exceptions when a specific crime crosses a line. President Trump has promised this as well, posting to Truth Social that he “will direct the Justice Department to vigorously pursue the death penalty to protect American families and children from violent rapists, murderers, and monsters” as soon as he is inaugurated.

20. Investigate Soros’s network of DAs

George Soros’s empire seems to have its tentacles all over the world, bringing chaos as a feature. He is single-handedly and intentionally destroying great American cities by installing hand-picked district attorneys, two of whom have tried to put President Trump in prison. His influence and funding mechanisms should be investigated.

21. Push national reciprocity.

There is no reason that the Second Amendment is treated as unimportant and that we should tolerate it essentially being banned in some states because the left doesn’t like guns. Bearing arms is a right, and that right must be recognized nationally. Reintroducing the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which eases regulations for carrying a firearm across state lines, would be a good start.

These are some ideas that can steer America in the direction it was always meant to go and the direction it was moving during President Trump’s first term. This second term needs to be full steam ahead, with no room for error. America may not get another chance. But, if President Trump is successful in carrying out the MAGA agenda, he will be remembered as the historic figure who saved the greatest nation on earth and gave it an infinitely brighter future for decades to come.

*  *  *

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

Encode, an artificial intelligence (AI) advocacy group, filed a brief in support of Elon Musk’s recent lawsuit against OpenAI, arguing that enabling the conversion toward a for-profit entity could endanger public interest.

Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last month, arguing that the entity was formed on promises that it would retain its nonprofit status focused on safe AI use. Musk said he invested in the project based on this premise. Disrupting the status quo “will seriously harm plaintiffs and the public at large,” the complaint said.

In the brief, Encode is described as “a youth-led organization advocating for safe and responsible artificial intelligence (AI)” with “a network of over 1,000 volunteers across 40 countries.”

On Dec. 27, Encode filed a proposed amicus curiae brief with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Oakland Division, supporting Musk’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the transition.

“If the world truly is at the cusp of a new age of artificial general intelligence (AGI), then the public has a profound interest in having that technology controlled by a public charity legally bound to prioritize safety and the public benefit rather than an organization focused on generating financial returns for a few privileged investors,” the brief said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has admitted that AI poses severe risks to humanity, Encode said. Altman signed a statement along with numerous luminaries, including Nobel Prize winners, saying that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.”

People worldwide are already facing challenges from AI technologies including disinformation, algorithmic bias, labor displacement, and democratic erosion, which makes keeping AI safe a “pressing, immediate concern,” the advocacy group said.

OpenAI currently runs a capped-profit subsidiary that is fully controlled by the OpenAI nonprofit parent company, which is expected to ensure the safe use of AGI.

In Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, the boards of nonprofit charitable corporations owe fiduciary duties toward their beneficiaries, which in this case would be “humanity,” Encode said.

By transferring operations to a Delaware public benefit corporation (PBC), OpenAI’s priorities would shift from ensuring the “safety of advanced AI” to shareholder interests. Allowing such a transition is harmful to the public interest, the brief said.

In a Dec. 27 blog post titled “Why OpenAI’s Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission,” OpenAI said that transitioning to a PBC would be best for the long-term success of the nonprofit’s mission to ensure that AI “benefits all of humanity.”

“The PBC is a structure⁠ used⁠ by many others that requires the company to balance shareholder interests, stakeholder interests, and a public benefit interest in its decision making,” the post said.

OpenAI Plans, Musk Conflict

OpenAI began as a research lab in 2015. It had a goal of advancing AI in a way “most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” the post said. Out of the $137 million in donations it collected initially, less than a third came from Musk.

After OpenAI management realized the project would require “far more capital,” they created the current for-profit structure controlled by the nonprofit in a bid to collect funds from investors.

According to OpenAI, the new PBC “will run and control OpenAI’s operations and business, while the non-profit will hire a leadership team and staff to pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science.”

In a Dec. 13 post, OpenAI had dismissed claims made by Musk in his lawsuit. It said the lawsuit was the fourth legal challenge against OpenAI by the billionaire in less than a year.

“In 2017, Elon not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit as OpenAI’s proposed new structure. When he didn’t get majority equity and full control, he walked away and told us we would fail,” it said.

“Now that OpenAI is the leading AI research lab and Elon runs a competing AI company, he’s asking the court to stop us from effectively pursuing our mission.”

The Epoch Times contacted Musk for a comment but received no reply by publication time.

Besides the ethical concerns, Musk alleged in the complaint that OpenAI and its investor Microsoft roughly control around 70 percent of the generative AI market and engage in “anticompetitive conduct.”

OpenAI and Microsoft ban investors from funding OpenAI’s competitors, specifically Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, it said.

“OpenAI’s path from a nonprofit to for-profit behemoth is replete with per se anticompetitive practices, flagrant breaches of its charitable mission, and rampant self-dealing,” the complaint said.

xAI was formed in July 2023. The company introduced the Grok-1 AI model on the X social media platform a few months later, in November 2023, and has introduced updates to the tool.

In May, xAI raised $6 billion in funding. Last week, xAI said it has closed the funding and that the company’s progress is “accelerating rapidly.”

US home prices in the 20 largest cities rose 0.32% MoM in October (the latest data from S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller), considerably hotter than the 0.22% rise expected. However, despite the MoM beat, the pace of annual acceleration has declined to its slowest since Sept 2023…

Source: Bloomberg

So 100bps of rate-cuts prompted a reacceleration in home prices…

…despite surging mortgage rates…

Arguably, (lagged) mortgage rates increased during that period, and dipped since (positive short-term for the highly smoothed and lagged Case Shiller series), but as is clear, things do not end well…

“Our National Index hit its 17th consecutive all-time high, and only two markets – Tampa and Cleveland – fell during the past month,” Brian D. Luke, CFA, head of commodities, Real & Digital Assets, commented.

“The annual returns continue to post positive inflation-adjusted returns but are falling well short of the annualized gains experienced this decade.“

However, home price appreciation does seem to track very closely with bank reserves at The Fed (6mo lag)…

Source: Bloomberg

Which suggests the pace of home price appreciation is set to slow further from here.

One year ago, when looking at the 20 most popular stories of 2023, we said that “while 2023 did have a seemingly endless variety of social, economic, political, geopolitical and of course, financial and market, drama, the unprecedented onslaught of 2022 – which saw both the deadliest and most consequential global war since WWII and a historic inflationary onslaught – simply proved too great to beat…. although we are confident that’s only because the newsflow was merely resting ahead of 2024 when, thanks to a record number of elections across the world not to mention what may well be the most consequential presidential election in US history, the coming avalanche of news and propaganda will be sheer insanity, especially since the Fed has made its long awaited dovish pivot without successfully stamping out inflation first. So in retrospect, 2023 being somewhat tame by recent standards may have been a good thing: it allowed everyone to rest ahead of the main event.“

Boy, were we right, and in retrospect we certainly hope everyone did rest ahead of the countless 2024 main events because even though there were no market crashes yet (for reasons we will touch upon), 2024 was indeed the most exciting and eventful rollercoaster of non-stop newsflow we have yet encountered, one which not only saw the legacy political system finally crumble across “Western democracies” as country after country said “no more” to the three-headed globalist hydra of runaway inflation, corrupt establishment politicians, and uncontrolled illegal immigration, but one where the political economy and capital markets proved beyond a reasonable doubt that they are more inextricably welded together than ever before. Oh, and of course, it was also the year when the Fed’s apolitical facade crumbled, exposing the most important central bank in the world as nothing more than a puppet of shadowy establishment forces whose only task is to preserve the status quo…. and failing.

Let’s first take a quick look at what happened in the past year through the lens of the masses, and as a quick 4-minute refresher, here is a highlight reel from Googles “year in search” of all the big, but mostly irrelevant, topics that random people around the world obsessed over in 2024.

Of course, much of the stuff in the clip above is just fluff and distractions meant to keep the attention of the masses focused on trivial things. What we tried to do with our reporting throughout the year was to minimize the noise and to bring you, our readers, the signal, and while there was a nonstop barrage of the former, the underlying newsflow largely boiled down to four main categories:

• Political
• Financial
• Geopolitical
• Technological

Of the above, by far the most important cross-current across 2024 was the political, and there were two very clear reasons for that. First, as we said in our 2023 year in review post, 2024 would be a year with a record number of elections across the world…

… and second, and even more important, the US presidential election would take place in November, where the choice was clear: a full-blown acceptance of Marxist, DEI, woke ideology coupled with a fascist economy in the classical sense (namely a fusion between government and corporate interests) or some last-ditch hope for a return to normalcy.

To the first point, amid a global democratic…

… backslide…

… voters in over 70 nations, representing over half the world’s population, went to the polls…

… and cast a historic protest vote which led to the biggest blowback against the existing political system ever observed, with the incumbent establishment in the UK, France, Germany, and many other countries suffering an epic collapse and ushering in new political ideas and paradigms. Even the AP had to admit that “The ‘super year’ of elections has been super bad for incumbents as voters punish them in droves.” Why? Because of the unholy trinity we mentioned above, and unleashed by flailing globalists across the globe with catastrophic consequences: runaway inflation, corrupt/crony establishment politicians, and uncontrolled illegal immigration. Oh, and the fact that unlike the US, Europe does not have a reserve currency and can’t print its way out of recession leaving its markets in the dust and its population increasingly unhappy, certainly does not help.

The punchline, however, came on November 5 when, to the shock of liberals everywhere, the mainstream media and the always wrong pollsters, Trump was elected for a third time, only this time the election was such a blowout success as Trump won both the Electoral college and the popular vote (coupled with a Republican sweep of Congress) that not even Soros’ countless minions could steal this election. To be sure, much of Trump’s hardline campaign promises, speeches and platform views have been since materially diluted…

… but even so, the hope that Trump’s return to the White House will also return the US to some normalcy after years of unbridled insanity by Biden’s woke puppetmasters, was enough to send stocks (and bitcoin) soaring to record highs adding trillions in value as the market gave its clear seal of approval to the new administration (more on the later), not to mention a near record surge in small business optimism which saw its biggest jump since the first time Trump was elected.

What is ironic about the above chart is that if one believed the Biden admin, that surge in optimism would be impossible: after all, month after month the White House would shovel “data” down everyone’s throat that showed the US economy was spectacular and growing at a red hot pace, even though – as we repeatedly warned – the only thing that was coming out of the Biden BLS month after month was completely fake data about jobs (as we warned in March 29, 2024 “Philadelphia Fed Admits US Payrolls Overstated By At Least 800,000“). Just a few months later we got evidence that one should never believe any so-called “data” coming out of Biden’s administration, when in late August, just as we had warned, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised down the number of jobs in the past year by 818,000 – one of the biggest downward revisions to key economic data in history – and admitted that nearly every other job had been faked, and instead of a 230K average monthly jobs increase, the US had been generating on average just 130K jobs.

Once the myth of Biden’s “strong economy” collapsed, everything else went promptly followed suit, as did Biden’s – and soon after – Kamala’s chances of winning. But one wouldn’t know that listening to the polls which were just as wrong as in 2016 when they said Hillary’s odds of winning were “more than 99%“. In fact, according to the RealClearPolitics poll average, Kamala had the lead up until the very last day.

Not everyone was wrong, though. We, along with a handful of other sites, repeatedly warned that most polls are inaccurately biased in favor of Biden/Kamala thanks to chronic, relentless and aggressive oversampling of Democrats. And just like in 2016, we were right… as was Polymarket: the sensational upstart which emerged out of nowhere, which consistently managed to call the correct outcome of every major event, took the country by storm when its opinion diverged dramatically with established polls…

Republican sweep odds hit a record 46% (post Biden) as Trump’s lead in all swing states is now solidly in the double digits, according to Polymarket pic.twitter.com/dlnXtR7zG0

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 22, 2024

… and in the end, proved to be spot on after Trump’s blowout victory which was so large, not even Democrats could steal the election again.

There was more: yes, the economy appeared strong (for all the wrong reasons, as we explain below), but that did not matter to ordinary middle-class Americans who may have had a job, but instead of dwelling on GDP, were much more concerned by the ongoing surge in prices which shrank their inflation-adjusted paychecks month after month. And while Democrats pretended as if prices were not at all time highs and rising at a 3%+ pace, we warned long before the elections, that – to ordinary Americans – only inflation matters. We were right.

Only inflation matters: not immigration, not crime, not equity, not abortion, not climate change, not guns pic.twitter.com/eOQOyDE2zW

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 30, 2024

But while it was the runaway inflation on one hand, and the collapsing myth of Biden’s strong economy (despite persistently record high prices) which both set the stage for Trump’s victory, what cemented it was that fateful evening of July 13 when the former – and future – president survived an assassination attempt on live TV while speaking at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooter’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear after a last second turn of the head saving Trump’s life…

… and set the stage for his victory. Ironically, the trigger that prompted Trump to move in the last second – and saved his life – was a peek at the chart showing the record surge of illegal US immigration under the Biden admin.

Ironic that the same flood of illegals that was supposed to win Kamala’s election and cement a dynasty of Democrat presidents for generations, saved Trump’s life and put him back in the White House.

While Trump’s victory and the landslide against incumbent political parties framed the biggest stories in the political realm, the world of finance and economics was once again dominated by the Federal Reserve, as well as the US Treasury, both of which had a clear mandate: do not rock the boat, do not allow the US economy to fall into recession, debt be damned, and above all make sure that Trump is not elected. It did not quite work out as expected.

To be sure, 2024 was literally a pivotal year for the Fed: after an aggressive tightening campaign which pushed the Fed Funds rate from 0% in early 2022 to 5.25% less two years later, the Fed decided that with inflation dropping from double digits – if still a red hot (and once again rising) 3.3% for core CPI – it had vanquished inflation, and that Powell was the second coming of Paul Volcker.

Couple that with the abovementioned shocker from the Biden BLS when the US was “unexpectedly” found to have overestimated jobs by over 800K, and in late September, the Fed – less than three months before the election – decided that the time has come not only to cut rates, but to do so with a bang in the form of a jumbo rate cut, slashing the Fed Funds by a whopping 50bps, as if the economy had suddenly collapsed into a deflationary recession when in reality prices – and the stock market not to mention bitcoin – were record high and rising at a breakneck pace (as we warned in August in “Powell Vows To Cut Rates With Stocks, Home Prices, Rents And Food At All Time Highs“), and just as core CPI had bottomed and was once again on the way up.

It was, of course, a catastrophic policy error, as demonstrated by the market’s own reaction because after cutting rates by 100bps in three months, the 10y Yield responded by surging by 100bps, a mirror image of what should be happening if the Fed had made the correct decision.

Instead the market was screaming loudly that the Fed’s rate cuts are setting the stage for another 1970’s type inflationary conflagration…

… and that instead of the second coming of Volcker, Powell was actually just another Arthur Burns in hawk’s clothing.

Ironically, we didn’t even need the market to tell us the Fed had made a terrible mistake: less than three months after the  jumbo rate cut, Powell himself conceded on live TV that the Fed had been too aggressive in its dovish outlook, and that all those rate cuts penciled in for 2024 (when the assumption was that Kamala would be president in 2025 and onward) were, well, a mistake and by mid-December, just weeks after Trump won an avalanche victory, Powell pivoted into a rabid hawk once again, telling markets that the latest rate cut may well be the last one because, well, you know Trump tariffs or something. Because the Fed, which in its own words, never reacts to political pressure, not only reacted, but preacted and assumed that Trump would impose tariffs which would ignite inflation – when they may just as easily spark another global deflationary recession – over a month before the 47th president was even inaugurated!

So much for the “apolitical” Fed.

And let’s not forget the Treasury, which as we first discussed back in the summer of 2023, had been the mystery force behind the ability of Bidenomics to delay a recession again and again, and all it cost was trillions and trillions in debt. As a reminder, we first explained what was really going on in “Here Is The $1 Trillion “Stealth Stimulus” Behind Bidenomics“, when we showed that the recent surge in the US deficit was the artificial, debt-funded sugar high that was redlining the US economic engine. One year later it got even worse, and after the deficit of fiscal 2024 closed out the year right on top of where it was in 2023, the spending spree only accelerated in the last months of Biden’s administration…

… and the first two months of fiscal 2025 are already on pace for a new record high!

And the trade-off of this unprecedented sugar rush? $1 trillion in new federal debt every 100 days, bringing the total to a gargantuan $36.2 trillion, up $8.5 trillion, or a stunning 30%, since Biden’s inauguration….

… with gross interest expense on US debt now running at a record $1.2 trillion (and rising every day), surpassing defense and health spending as US government outlays, with just Social Security spending ahead of interest on the debt.

Finally, just to make sure that the status quo persists, and that the 47th president is a Democrat, Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen threw in a stunning freebie: a T-Bill “reverse-twist” starting in 2022 when in order to drain the $2.5 trillion in inert funds caught in the Fed’s reverse repo facility, the Treasury launched a historic Bill issuance spree which culminated with $2 trillion in excess T-Bill sales, which amplified the stimulating effect from the reckless deficit spending, and overstimulated the economy even more.

Putting it all together, with the help of the Fed and the Treasury, the US economy managed to surprise to the upside in 2024 even though, as we now know, all those trillions in excess debt and those recent rate cuts eventually hit “peak stimulus” and the result was that the US labor market peaked some time in 2023 and was all downhill from there as the near record negative revision to jobs showed. One can only imagine if there was no concerted effort by the Fed and the Treasury to keep Trump out of the White House, how deep a recession the US economy would be in right now.

Alas, now that Trump is in the White House and can look forward to little to no support from the Fed or from a US Treasury that will no longer spend like a drunken sailor under Scott Bessent, we have a feeling that it won’t take long for the long overdue recession to hit the US economy head on, especially – and somewhat counterintuitively – if Elon Musk’s DOGE is even remotely successful. Because for a debt-funded regime like the US, even the smallest hiccup in issuing $1 trillion every 100 days means immediately economic and market calamity. And while Trump and Elon truly hope that the US population is ready and willing to make some sacrifices for the sake of austere belt-tightening if it leads to some nebulous “greater good” down the line, both are in for the surprise of their lifetimes.

Turning to geopolitics, 2024 was unexpectedly an easing from the torrid pace of 2023. Yes, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continued, but no new military conflicts emerged, and even though Israel ascended rapidly to near hegemonic status in the middle east after blitz campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon which crippled Lebanon and Iran, leaving them bruised and battered and their militaries in shambles, the middle eastern conflict never truly spun out of control. Why? Because Biden’s puppetmasters were at least smart enough to realize that had oil soared to $100 or more and sending gas at the pump to $4 and higher, which a real war between Iran and Israel would inevitably deliver, Biden’s chances of re-election were nil. Which is why they did everything they could to delay the Middle Eastern conflict until after the election. As for the war in Ukraine, that was largely on autopilot, with Russia methodically and systematically entering deeper and deeper into Ukraine territory, and with funding for Zelensky about to be cut off, an imminent ceasefire now appears almost certain.

Finally, looking at markets and the continued impact of technology, it was largely a continuation of events in 2023, when the bank bailout early in the year put an end to the Fed’s reserve drain which in turn triggered the “Fed put” giving markets a carte blanche to meltup without fear of retribution, while the continued obsession with AI and chatbots meant that the Mag7 winners of 2023 would extend their amazing run into 2024.

We won’t bother your with details – after all, we do that every single day on these pages – suffice to say that the combination of an easing Fed, at least for three months ahead of the election when Kamala had a decent chance of winning if not so much after Trump won, coupled with an epic AI bubble serves as an extremely powerful force.

How powerful? Well, up until the Fed’s December hawkish pivot, 2024 was on pace to generate the best S&P return this century. After the recent turbulence, what would otherwise have been a 30% return, is down to “only” 25%, which still means that 3 of BIden’s 4 years saw the US equity market rise more than 20%!

One reason for this unprecedented meltup in the past two years was the fact that while Fed reserves remained unchanged (and even rose for a while after the bank bailouts in March ’23) during 2023 and 2024, the funds held in the Fed’s reverse repo facility were slowly drained day after day (thanks to Bill issuance), giving dry powder with which to push stock higher.

As for the AI bubble which took the market by storm ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT3.5, here is a brief snapshot of the last two years…

… which shows that there have been triumphs and disappointments, although the reality is that we have seen chatbots come and go, and the world always moved on to a new, bigger and shinier fad. This time, however, prices may have pulled just a little bit too much from the future, as this breakdown of the Mag7 vs the S&P shows.

In any event, we don’t have that much new to add here: exactly one year ago we said that “we would be remiss not to mention the single biggest market narrative – and tech story – of 2023, namely the unprecedented AI mania, which manifested itself in an explosion in the “Magnificent 7” mega tech stocks which now make up a record 30% of the S&P’s market cap.“

Maybe the biggest difference from a year ago is that “more of the same” means that never before has so much market influence and impact been concentrated in so few stocks, and at last check, the 10 largest stocks in the S&P now account for 38% of total market cap. Actually, one correction: it’s not “never before” – the last time so few stocks had such a big impact on the market was… just before the Great Depression.

But surely this time it’s different. One thing that is not different, however, is that all those chips and data centers will need power… lots of power, and the US is woefully unprepared to power up the AI revolution.

Which incidentally is why back in April we urged our readers to invest not in AI, but in the utilities and companies that will power and enable AI and provide the infrastructure to build out the hundreds of data centers that will be needed should AI prove to not be a bust (see “The Next AI Trade” from April 3). To those who took our advice, congratulations: your basket of “Power up America” stocks (blue line below) significantly outperformed both the “Broad AI” basket and the “Data Center Equipment” baskets.

And no matter what else happens in the next four years, we expect that investments in US energy infrastructure will continue at an unprecedented pace as Donald “America First” Trump seeks to preserve the US status as the world’s AI leader, not to mention the world’s most exceptional nation, one whose total market cap is now substantially larger than the rest of the world combined!

To be sure, there are legitimate reasons for US exceptionalism besides Fed balance sheet financial engineering and chatbot fads: the ability to catch a 100 ton starship, the heaviest object that has ever left the earth with two chopsticks, as Elon Musk did in October, is certainly one of those memorable “where were you when…” moments that everyone will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Watch it again.

On the 5th integrated flight test of Starship the Super Heavy tower catch (better know as Mechazilla chopstick catch) SUCCEEDED AT THE FIRST TEST.

Congratulations @elonmusk and all the @SpaceX team! pic.twitter.com/Th2zzSDyv5

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 13, 2024

And speaking of Elon, he also deserves congratulations for converting X (f/k/a Twitter), from what was once the most corrupt and censored social media network in the world controlled by an army of woke, bluepilled Karens, into a bastion of free speech, one which many will agree was instrumental in Trump’s victory on November 5. Many smirked one year ago this day when we said that “in less than a decade, Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter will seem like one of the century’s biggest bargains.” Fast forward to today when Elon Musk is not only the world’s richest man once more, but he is that by a huge margin, worth some $200 billion more than Jeff Bezos’ $240 billion, and he largely has X to thank for this, even as virtue-signaling corporations (who all work in conjunction with the deep state in hopes of getting some fast-track access to those very generous taxpayer-funded government contracts) are doing everything in their power to demonetize and starve the company by continuing to pull their ads.

We say this as one of the first media outlets that was dubbed “conspiracy theorists” by the authorities, long before everyone else joined the club. Oh yes, we’ve been there: we were suspended for half a year on Twitter for telling the truth about Covid, and then we lost most of our advertisers after the Atlantic Council‘s weaponized “fact-checkers” such as Newsguard put us on every ad agency’s black list while anonymous CIA sources at the AP slandered us for being “Kremlin puppets” – which reminds us: for those with the means, desire and willingness to support us, please do so by becoming a premium member: we are now almost entirely reader-funded so your financial assistance will be instrumental to ensure our continued survival into 2025 and beyond.

The bottom line, at least for us, is that the past five years have been a stark lesson in how quickly an ad-funded business can disintegrate in this world which makes the dystopian nightmare of 1984 seem more real each day, and we have since taken measures. Four years ago, we launched a paid version of our website, which is entirely ad and moderation free, and offers readers a variety of premium content. It wasn’t our intention to make this transformation but unfortunately we know which way the wind is blowing and it is only a matter of time before the gatekeepers of online ad spending block us and those like us for good as traditional media continues to melt away, losing more credibility and readers each and every day. As such, if we are to have any hope in continuing it will come directly from you, our readers. We will keep the free website running for as long as possible, but we are certain that it is only a matter of time before the hammer falls as the deep state retaliates to the shocking loss of 2024 and lashes out at all new media, as the deep state will stop at nothing to silence all independent voices in order to preserve mind control over the population.

How long do we have? Matt Taibbi may have said it best a few days ago when he wrote the following:

If you subscribe to this site it’s likely because, like me, you felt the world slipping off its axis and were looking for someone to reassure you you weren’t crazy. We lived through a difficult time together, but the fever finally broke this fall, and the world is now allowed to remark on the Emperor’s lack of clothes. It feels like good news, but what now? Can we go back a normal life? Will it last?

I think so, for a time…. A core reflex in these decades of postmodern insanity was constant rejection of things we thought we knew in favor of New, Improved Beliefs packaged from above. But some things don’t change. Until we do away with holidays, little kids will always have the same look on their faces I’ll see tomorrow morning, when mine unwrap their presents. Farts will always be funny, teenagers will always menace cars and have too much sex, NBA players will always travel, and parents bound by love for their children will always find peace growing old together. Fundamental things do apply, as time goes by.

Mad scientists who think they can redesign human experience are always undone by eternal truths that arrogance won’t allow them to grasp, one being that life isn’t so bad, another that there are some things people will never understand. But that’s the good news. Learning to embrace the unknown is what allows us to be happy, in our handful of turns on the planet. Heavy thoughts for Christmas, but I mean it in a good way. I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that first the first time in ages, the exhaustion of managing parallel truths has subsided. Now we just have one crazy world to worry about. Normal feels normal. Christmas feels like Christmas. We’ve won a panic reprieve.

As always, we thank all of our readers for making this website – which has never seen one dollar of outside funding (and despite amusing recurring allegations, has certainly never seen a ruble from either Putin or the KGB either, sorry CIA) and has never spent one dollar on marketing – a small (or not so small) part of your daily routine.

Which also brings us to another critical topic: that of fake news, and something we – and others who do not comply with the established narrative – have been accused of. While we find the narrative of fake news laughable, after all every single article in this website is backed by facts and links to outside sources, it is clearly a dangerous development, and a very slippery slope that the entire developed world is pushing for what is, when stripped of fancy jargon, internet censorship under the guise of protecting the average person from “dangerous information.” It’s also why we are preparing for the next onslaught against independent thought and why we had no choice but to roll out a premium version of this website.

In addition to the other themes noted above, we expect the crackdown on free speech by various deep state tentacles to accelerate in the coming year (although it will be mostly in the shadows, at least for the time being, until Trump gets bored or tired of fighting the infinitely more powerful octopus that is truly in control of the United States) especially as the following list of Top 20 articles for 2024 reveals, many of the most popular articles in the past year were precisely those which the conventional media would not touch with a ten foot pole, both out of fear of repercussions and because the MSM has now become a PR agency for either a political party or some unelected, deep state bureaucrat, which in turn allowed the alternative media to continue to flourish in an information vacuum and take significant market share from the established outlets by covering topics which established media outlets refuse to do, in the process earning itself the derogatory “fake news” condemnation.

We are also grateful that our readers have, for the 16th year in a row, realized that it is incumbent upon them to decide what is, and isn’t “fake news.”

* * *

And so, before we get into the details of what has now become an annual tradition for the last day of the year, those who wish to jog down memory lane, can refresh our most popular articles for every year during our no longer that brief, 16-year existence, starting with 2009 and continuing with 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 , 2021, 2022 and 2023.

So without further ado, here are the articles that you, our readers, found to be the most engaging, interesting and popular based on the number of hits, during the past year.

• In 20th spot with just under 470,000 views, was a reminder that the “Get woke, go broke” mantra is all too real for the once-iconic US airplane builder, Boeing, which in recent years has been reduced to the butt of all jokes, as not only its airplanes which were “designed by clowns…supervised by monkeys” were falling out of the sky forcing a crushing restructuring of all operations, but whose catastrophic DEI practices sent its stock in a faster tailspin than its 737 MAX jets. But as always, the coverup is worse than the crime, and for Boeing the pain is just starting as nearly half a million were shocked to learn that not just one but a “Second Boeing-Linked Whistleblower Dies“. And with most of the upper management at Boeing, including its CEO, gone in 2024 one can only imagine just how deep the rot at the company – which was so desperate to cover up its crimes and incompetence with years of fake virtue signaling and incapable minority hires – truly runs. Expect many more ugly revelations on this story in 2025.

• In 19th spot, just over 475,000 readers were reminded that the biggest crime of the decade, if not in US history, was the highly secretive and premeditated creation (and subsequent leak) of the covid virus, which lead to a historical global shutdown, the forced layoffs of tens of millions of Americans and shuttering of countless small businesses (allowing their large competitors to grow unmeasurably large), the deaths of millions, and the injection of tens of trillions of fiscal and monetary stimuli into the global economy sparking the runaway inflation that followed shortly thereafter. They did that thanks to a “Bombshell Fauci Documentary Which Nails The Whole COVID Charade“, a charade which has Anthony Fauci as its main antagonist, and which led us to be barred, censored and suspended pretty much everywhere, including Twitter (now X), for daring to tell the truth about covid’s Chinese origins which also included secretive funding by Fauci and his ecosystem of criminal “health professionals” whose actions directly and indirectly led to the deaths of millions. So you will excuse us for looking forward to the inevitable perp walks and arrests that we hope will follow when RFK Jr. does what he has promised to do.

• The 18th most popular article of the year, read by over 482,000, was the event that confirmed once and for all that the “Democrat” party is anything but, when in a not-so-quiet internal coup, the man whom the media had for years had lauded and said was perfectly capable and functioning turned out to be a dementia-ridden vegetable, allowing his unelected puppetmasters full control over the country and the world, and after a catastrophic debate with Trump had his long political career summarily executed by Nancy Pelosi. We are talking of course about Joe Biden’s shocking withdrawal by tweet from the presidential race one quiet weekend in July, less than 4 months before the elections, a decision which we now know was forced upon him by Democrat Party oligarchs, and which forced “Dems To Go Full Throttle On Kamala After Biden Drops Out Of 2024 Race.” And like so many other random decisions by Democrats, this one too was a catastrophic failure, culminating with a sweeping victory for Trump and the Republicans in an election that was so one-sided not even the Democrats could rig (more on that below).

• With the Ukraine war soon set to enter its third year – unless Trump indeed manages to end it in his first 100 days in office – it is easy to forget that the risk of a nuclear exchange, and war, is just one mistargeted missile launch away. But 485,000 readers got a reminder when they read the 17th most popular article of 2024, the one in which Russia’s Vladimir Putin warned that “Ukraine Is Becoming ‘Global War’ After Western Long-Range Weapons Used Against Russia.” And for what? Just so the Biden crime family could cover up its unprecedented (and rather petty) criminal spree, which not coincidentally originated in Kiev roughly around the time of the first CIA-led coup against the country’s democratically elected president in 2014. Another “not coincidence”: Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter which just so happens extended back to 2014, right around the time said crackhead son-cum-feces painter was hired by Ukraine’s top energy company as an expert on… energy. And while Hunter may be pardoned, it is unlikely that his father will also face justice before that sad White House-occupying vegetable passes on. And with that the secrets of why the world nearly ended in a fiery nuclear fireball will died with him. 

• Like everything else coming out of the Democratic party in the run up to the Nov 5 election, one of the most anticipated pre-election events thrown by the losing candidate was nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Yes, one week before the election in late October, when Kamala – according to countless corrupt pollsters was leading Trump in virtually every category – had a chance to allegedly “cement her victory” by offering her fans what they wanted, namely a spectacle by a highly compensated actor, the Democratic frontrunner made a catastrophic bait and switch, and the result as 482,000 readers would learn was that “Kamala Got Booed After Beyoncé Bait-N-Switch,” and instead of getting the most popular woman singer in the world, the crowd got… Willie Nelson, and we got our 16th most popular article of the year. Just a few days after, instead of the victory as so many had promised, Kamala’s fans got… a crushing defeat, not that it was Beyone’s fault. We would eventually learn that Kamala’s entire Hollywood and influencer “fan base” was nothing more than paid actors, the support fake, the plaudits bought and paid for, and after Kamala’s catastrophic loss we would also learn that not only $1 billion in Soros money was spent on various high profile actors, but – adding insult to loss – the Kamala campaign would end up broke and in debt. Just like everything else attempted by Democrats.

• And speaking of Trump’s avalanche victory, it all started with the brutal June 27 debate, the first and final, in which the former – and future – president crushed a clearly incompetent and dementia-ridden Joe Biden who was unable to string two sentences together let alone respond to Trump’s relentless attacks. The outgoing head of the Biden crime family, who according to so many media lies was “beyond competent” and “sharp as a tack”, appeared no more coherent than a vegetable as Trump steamrolled him on national TV over and over, and as we covered in our 15th most popular post of the year read by just over half a million, “‘Presidential’ Trump Dominates Stuttering Biden In Debate: “My Retribution Is Going To Be Success.” Just over 4 months later, Trump indeed got his retribution, only it wasn’t against Biden but against his even more incompetent surrogate, Kamala, who disappeared from the political stage just as quickly as she appeared on it. 

• While none of the billionaires and uber-connected politicians that for decades used Jeffrey Epstein pedophilia services have yet gone to prison, 2024 was a stark reminder that the virtue signalers in Hollywood are no better and when left alone to their devices are just as depraved and perverted. The “revelation” came after a crackdown on one-time entertainment mogul and golden boy, Sean “Diddy” Combs, who as over 535,000 readers learned in “Sean Combs Homes In LA and Miami Simultaneously Raided by Homeland Security“, our 14th most popular article of the year, was arrested in a massive racketeering conspiracy crackdown for masterminding a massive sex trafficking ring which abused, threatened, and coerced women to do his bidding and that of his illustrious “virtuous” buddies in yet another example that what the rich and powerful in the US enjoy doing most of all is taking advantage of those who are most helpless to resist them, especially young girls. A good way to measure the true change in the top US power echelons after the November election will be to see if we learn how deep the Diddy rabbit hole goes… and of course if anyone at all linked to Epstein will ever go to prison. Alas, we are not holding out breath.

• In 13th spot, with 505,000 views, was a reminder that had Kamala not lost the election, the US would have become (an even greater) dystopian Marxist nightmare, where drive-by killings of successful entrepreneurs has become normalized to the point where the killers are sanctified; this reminder took place in New York one early December morning, when an wealthy Gen-Zer, who grew up in a life of opulence and had everything handed to him on a silver platter, ambushed the CEO of a company that has made life drastically better for millions of sick Americans, and shot him in cold blood in the center of New York city, as captured in “Horrific Video Shows Assassination Of UnitedHealthcare CEO In Midtown Manhattan”, which after the drug and shit-ridden hellhole that is San Francisco, has rapidly become the most emblematically broken Democratic city in the US. A tragedy which we can only hope is not the start of a wave of mass shootings of successful Americans at the hands of envious, brainwashed liberal psychopaths who hope to restore “social and wealth equality” the same way every doomed socialist regime does in its final days: through expropriation and murder.

• A year which saw AI lead the market and especially the Nasdaq to outsized gains, also demonstrated just how fragile our tech-reliant world has become, when one fine summer morning, the world awoke paralyzed when a computer glitch at cybersecurity software provider CrowdStrike effectively – and literally – ground the world to a halt, as we described in “Largest IT Outage in History Sparks Disruptions Worldwide“, an article read by just over 600,000. And while CrowdStrike’s stock promptly plunged from record highs in the aftermath of the “glitch”, the fact that it promptly recovered all its losses and is once again back at all time bubble highs, shows once again that nobody every learns any lessons.

• If Kamala’s idea of a successful campaign involved paying millions of Soros’ dollars to Hollywood celebs and “influencers” to pretend they are her friends, Trump took the opposite approach, and the man who saw the entire weaponized Biden Department of Justice go after him – and lose – emerged as a man of the people, whether it meant blasting out his mugshot social media networks, serving french fries in McDonalds, or stunning the mainstream media as “Trump Holds Press Conference In Garbage Truck En Route To Green Bay Rally.” Trump’s troll of Biden, who had said the day before that supporters of Donald Trump are garbage, and which was enjoyed by just about 604,000 readers, was this election’s “deplorables” moment, one which as we would learn just a few days later sealed Trump’s victory which apparently came as a shock to democrats who had spent months catering to less than 1% of the population (i.e., the clinically insane trannies), while losing not only the immigrant vote but also alienating virtually all of the flyover states in a second case study of how not to run a presidential campaign (the first one of course belonged to Hillary Clinton).

• 2024 wasn’t just a year of domestic politics: there was a lot of geopolitical drama too, and one of the most notable episodes came in May when “Iranian President Raisi, Foreign Minister Confirmed Dead In Helicopter Crash“, also the 10th most popular article of the year, coming at a time when Iran and Israel were engaged in a proxy (and not so proxy) war in Lebanon, and presaging a dramatic shift in power politics in the Middle East. Was the deadly crash the work of Mossad, which as we learned later managed to successfully sabotage the entire Hazbollah communications infrastructure with deadly consequences, or was it truly a fluke? We and some 615,000 of our readers, will probably never learn however Iran is exiting 2024 in a much weaker position that it entered it while Israel is ascendant, with virtually no Middle-Eastern foes left strong enough to challenge it.

• And speaking of Mossad’s technical genius, the 9th most viewed article of 2024 with over 640,000 views came a few months later, when in September a covert operation of the Israeli intelligence agency unleashed chaos and resulting in “Hundreds Wounded, Many Dead in Beirut After Israel Remotely Detonates Hezbollah Pagers“, a stunning example of brutal, demoralizing military sabotage, and one which set the stage for Israel to wipe out virtually the entire Hezbollah leadership, tipping the balance of power strong in Israel’s favor in the middle east, where the Jewish state now controls not only Gaza and Lebanon, but has effective control over Syria after the recent coup there. As we enter 2025, and much attention still remains on whether and when China will invade Taiwan, a just as important question is what will the rising Israel seek – and achieve – in 2025. If were were nuclear enrichment and/or power plants in Iran, we would be very, very nervous…

• Geopolitics was certainly a key anchor of 2024 newsflow as peace crumbled around the world where every US adversary sought to take advantage of the puppet vegetable in the White House and the ongoing erosion of Pax Americana, but the biggest events of the year took place domestically, and the one which arguably may have been the biggest “fork in the word” was the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in which if an MKUltra‘ed shooter had aimed just one inch to the right, the US would be under a Kamala dictatorship right now. We will have more to say about that later, but the big question is whether the US secret service was also in on the ploy to terminate the former and future president, a question addressed in “Malice Or Massive Incompetence”: Erik Prince Gives Detailed Assessment Of Secret Service Failure, and which was asked at least 645,000 times by our readers, making it the 8th most popular article of the year. Alas, while there are plenty of conspiracy theories about what happened on that warm July day, unfortunately we will never get the full answer.

• There were two more geopolitical shocks in the year’s Top 10 and both once again involved Iran and Israel, two countries who appeared set to begin war at each other for much of the year, and they finally did – for the second time – in October, just days after Israel killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, however just like during the first exchange in April, the outcome was scripted and orchestrated to result in as little damage as possible. That’s what 670,000 readers found out when they read that the “White House Warns Iran To Imminently Launch Ballistic Missiles On Israel“, and while Iran did eventually launch missiles, and Israel retaliated, there was no actual damage. How could it be that two ancient middle-eastern enemies could pursue such as fake posture of aggression? It later turned out that the Biden puppet handlers were orchestrating it all, and giving advice for both sides how to save face but how not to spark a regional conflict that would send the price of oil surging ahead of the US election. That’s right, in the end it all ended up being about the price of gas at the pump, although we wonder if Biden’s puppetmasters would have bothered if they had known that the senile president would end up losing. One thing is certain: under president Trump, the next time Iran and Israel start firing at each other, the outcome will be far more deadly.

• The November presidential election was the biggest political event of the year, and the staggering illegal immigration triggered by Biden (in hopes of picking up Democratic votes) was perhaps the most decisive factor heading into the election (along with record prices and the runaway inflation sparked by the Fed years earlier). We got a brutal reminder of this in September when with less than two months until the election, just over 700,000 readers found that “Residents Of Springfield Ohio Beg For Help After 20,000 Haitians Overwhelm City,” making it the 6th most popular article fo 2024. And while the anecdotes of Haitians eating the local wildlife may have turned out to be largely fake, the soundbite of Trump lamenting that the illegals are “eating the dogs, eating the cats” during his one and only debate with Kamala, may have been sufficient to seal his victory .

• Earlier we noted that the sudden raid on Diddy was the 14th most popular article of the year, but even as the public’s attention turned to the latest inevitable episode of sexual predation by the ultra-wealthy, the original sexual predator and trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, still remains twice as popular perhaps due to the continued mystery surrounding his ultra powerful client list, where not a single pervert has gone to prison (because once you start naming names, the list goes to the very top). And there sure were plenty of perverts as we described in the 5th most popular article of 2024, which revealed to 735,000 readers that “Bill Clinton, Stephen Hawking At An Orgy, And Michael Jackson: Here’s Who’s In Unsealed Epstein Docs So Far.” With a list of rich and powerful clients that reads like the “who is who” of the world’s richest, most powerful and most connected, we don’t expect any tangible revelations or actions here despite repeat promises by Elon Musk to finally get to the bottom of just how far the abuse of innocent, underage children went.

• In recent years, the US had spent over a $100 billion to prop up Zelenskyy’s regime in Ukraine (and feed countless deep state mouths, not to mention keep the Biden crime family secrets hidden), meanwhile infrastructure back iun the US continued to age and deteriorate, with key chokepoints at risk of paralyzing the US economy if taken out by accident or enemy action. One example of this took place in March when the “Huge Bridge In Baltimore Collapsed After Container Ship Strike.” The collapse, which immediately paralyzed much of the commerce in the greater DC area, was read by just under 1 million readers, making it the 4th most popular article of 2024. While the US was lucky that the collapse appeared to have been accidental in nature – even though Gen Flynn suggested it may have been an enemy act – it won’t take much for terrorists to go after other similar key chokepoints in the coming years.

• For the third most popular article of 2024 we leave the continental US for the last time, and turn our attention to the Middle East where as noted above, Iran and Israel staged a grand, if gloriously fake, rehearsal to a (future) war, which saw both sides frothing at the mouth for blood, yet where keeping the price of gas low turned out to be far more important and elicited more than one emergency phone call from whoever it was that was controlling the Biden puppet in the White House. Still, at the time it all seemed so very real, and understandably almost 1.2 million readers tuned it to see what would happen as the “US Pressured China, Turkey And Saudi Arabia To Intervene An Halt An Iranian Attack on Israel.” The article, which was the the 3rd most popular of the year, focused on all the events that unfolded in mid-April when Iran and Israel appeared ready to start a regional war. In the end they didn’t… just as they didn’t 6 months later in October when the same choreographed drama took place. But with Israel feeling confident and viewing Iran as increasingly vulnerable, the odds are that the third time will be the charm for all those expecting an all out war between the two most powerful players in the middle east, a war which is likely to take place some time in 2025, just as all hell breaks loose everywhere.

• We doubt it will surprise anyone that Trump’s victory on November 5th, a blowout landslide which saw Republicans sweep Congress, and Trump win both the Electoral College and the popular vote in a testament to just how unpopular Kamala Harris had been all along, was one of the top two articles of the year with 1.46 million reads (an outcome we had once again correctly predicted, and which the polling class once again completely missed). Indeed, “Trump Wins, Sends ‘Trumpquake’ Through Washington” was the fitting end to a crazy year where nothing turned out as consensus had expected, even if in retrospect the outcome made all the sense in the world, and gave the US hope that there is still hope… alas since the deep state is on the other end, we aren’t holding our breath for said hope to turn into actual change.

• It may come as a surprise to some that Trump’s election was not the most popular article of 2024. There’s a reason for that: the event that made Trump’s election possible, the failed assassination attempt on Trump which took place one lazy summer weekend, and which was read by 1.7 million readers, was by and far the biggest event of the year. Whether it was another “insurance policy” by the deep state, or an insane, radicalized psychopath acting alone, we will never know but we do know that had the gunman aimed just one inch to the right, the fate of the world would have been radically different, the days of America as a superpower would be forever over and this website would likely not even exist right now.

And with all that behind us, and as we wave goodbye to another bizarre, exciting, surreal year, what lies in store for 2025, and the next half-decade?

We don’t know: as our frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don’t try, despite repeat baseless allegations that we constantly forecast the collapse of civilization: we leave the predicting to the “smartest people in the room” who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in 2024 when not long after the entire world realized just how clueless the Fed had been when it called the most crushing inflation in two generations “transitory”, the professional predictors reputation hit new lows as described in “How the Experts Got 2024 So Wrong“, and “What the Mainstream Media Got Wrong about the 2024 Election“, in the process adding strategists and analysts to the clueless ranks of economists, mainstream media and the professional polling class, not to mention all those “scientists” who made a mockery of both the scientific method and the “expert class” with their catastrophically bungled response to the covid pandemic, and then the response to the response, and so on… We merely observe, find what is unexpected, entertaining, amusing, surprising or grotesque in an increasingly bizarre, sad, and increasingly crazy world, and then just write about it.

We do know, however, that with central banks having flip-flopped yet again, and re-pivoting hawkishly less than three months after their surprise dovish pivot as stubborn inflation still rose more than 3%, with wages – especially for unionized and government workers – once again surging, home prices and rents refusing to drop despite 7% mortgage rates, and overall prices stuck at all time highs, the most likely outcome is another surge in inflation, and Jerome Powell becoming not the second coming of saint Paul Volcker but of satan Arthur Burns.

But even ignoring the impact on prices, one can’t just undo almost 20 years of central bank mistakes by willing them away (despite what Elon Musk and DOGE hope to achieve in the next few years); after all it is the trillions and trillions in monetary stimulus, the helicopter money, the MMT idiocy, and the endless deficit funding by central banks that made the current runaway inflation possible, the current attempt to stuff 15 years of toothpaste back into the tube, will be a catastrophic failure.

We are confident, however, that in the end it will be the very final backstoppers of the status quo regime, the central banking emperors of the New Normal, who will again be revealed as completely naked. When that happens and what happens after is anyone’s guess. But, as we have promised – and delivered – every year for the past 16, we will be there to document every aspect of it.

Finally, and as always, we wish all our readers the best of luck in 2025, with much success in trading and every other avenue of life. We bid farewell to 2024 with our traditional and unwavering year-end promise: Zero Hedge will be there each and every day – usually with a cynical smile (and with the CIA clearly on our ass now) – helping readers expose, unravel and comprehend the fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that defines every aspect of our increasingly broken economic, political and financial system.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Modernity.news,

Authorities in Germany reacted to the attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg by a Saudi Arabian migrant by warning that it may not be safe for migrants to go out at night due to fears of racist attacks.

Yes, really.

The terrorist, named as Taleb A. by German authorities, used emergency exit points situated around the market to plough a vehicle into more than 200 people during the attack.

A 9-year-old boy and four women were killed while a further 40 victims were left with serious or critical injuries.

After a demonstration that was dubbed “far-right” took place in the city during which protesters held up a banner with the word “remigration,” authorities and lobby groups are now warning of racist attacks targeting migrants.

NEW – Migrant association concerned about “right-wing violence” and strongly advises “people with a migration history not to move through the city alone and in the evening hours” after an Arab attacked the Christmas market — BILD pic.twitter.com/kD4HyOBc5p

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) December 30, 2024

The regional network of migrant organisations in Saxony-Anhalt (Lamsa) advised that “people with a migration background not to move around the city alone and in the evening hours.”

Calling for an increase in police patrols on New Year’s Eve, the group asserted that, “There were several racist attacks on migrants after the incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg.”

The regional bishop of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany, Friedrich Kramer, is also warning, “Ever since the attack , migrants in our midst have been afraid of being attacked and do not dare to leave their houses these days – we must face up to the new violence.”

Eva von Angern, leader of the Left Party in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt, also insisted that migrants should not be made scapegoats, writing on X about an “increase in hostile treatment” and attacks on foreigners.

Similar warnings were noticeably absent when it was revealed that despite comprising roughly 14.6 per cent of the population, foreign migrants were responsible for 58.5 per cent of all violent crimes in Germany.

Apparently, people being mean to migrants is a far more serious threat than migrants who plough cars into people.

As we previously highlighted, before the attack, police were busy patrolling Christmas markets focusing on the real problem – grannies with pocket knives in their handbags.

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

With the Santa rally dead and buried after the S&P saw two back-to-back 1% drops for the first time since August and sending the S&P sliding back under 6,000, US equity futures finally rose on the last day of 2024, setting stocks on course to snap three days of losses and build on this year’s powerful Wall Street rally. As of 8:00am, S&P futures rose 0.3% and Nasdaq futs were 0.4% higher, with all Mag7 stocks higher. European trading was muted, with several markets shut on New Year’s Eve and shortened sessions in London and Paris. 10Y yields extended their drop, sliding 1bp to 4.52% while the Bloomberg dollar index gained, capping the best year for the US currency since 2015. Bloomberg rebounded and oil dropped. The last day of the year has a sparse macro calendar and includes the Case-Shiller and the December Dallas Fed service activity index.

In premarket trading, the Mag7 were higher across the board (Apple 0.4%, Nvidia 0.7%, Microsoft 0.5%, Alphabet 0.5%, Meta Platforms 0.5%, Tesla 1.1%) as pension selling finally faded. Here are some other notable premarket movers:

• Acadia Pharmaceuticals shares gain 8.9% in the premarket session after an announcement that the company will replace Independent Bank Group Inc. in the S&P SmallCap 600 before the opening of trading on Jan. 3.
• Dave shares are down 7.6% ahead of the bell after the Federal Trade Commission said it referred its federal court case against the cash advance firm to the Justice Department, which has filed an amended complaint in the case.
• EHang Holdings ADRs climb 7.6% ahead of the bell after the urban air mobility (UAM) technology platform company gave preliminary revenue for the fourth quarter that topped its forecast.
• Sangamo Therapeutics plummet 52% in premarket trading, after Pfizer ended its collaboration and license agreement with the firm to develop a new gene therapy for hemophilia A. Pfizer’s decision comes as a surprise to analysts, who flag the risk of near-term liquidity issues at Sangamo.
• Verastem shares rise 37% in premarket trading on Tuesday after the biopharmaceutical company said FDA accepted to review its New Drug Application (NDA) for the treatment of adult patients with recurrent low-grade serous ovarian cancer.

With stocks set to end 2024 on a positive note, investors have much to ponder according to Bloomberg: some are concerned about the stamina of this year’s 24% S&P 500 rally, driven by the so-called Magnificent Seven cohort of tech giants. And there’s a range of uncertainties to confront in 2025, from Trump’s protectionist policies to the outlook for central bank policy and the health of the European and Chinese economies. Still, up until the Fed’s surprising hawkish pivot- which came once it was clear that Trump and not Kamala would be in the White House – the S&P was on pace for its best year this century. Even with the latest drawdown, stocks are still poised for a stellar 25% return this year, making it three years in the last four that the S&P has risen by more than 20%.

“Investors are in wait-and-see mode,” Noel Dixon, senior macro strategist at State Street Corp., told Bloomberg Television. “We don’t know what the retaliatory effects are going to be and how the Fed is ultimately going to react to those tariffs.”

European stock rose, sending the Stoxx 600 up 0.4% to session high; the CAC 40 and FTSE 100 rose 0.4% while other major markets including Italy and Germany are closed. Energy shares are the best performers as they track oil prices higher while miners also outperform. Here are the biggest European movers:

• Galp Energia shares drop as much as 5.9% to a one-month low, after latest drilling results at the Portuguese firm’s Mopane-2A well in Namibia yielded gas condensate. The discovery suggests more exploration could be needed to justify Galp’s first development, RBC says.
• Wizz Air shares rose after the airline operator said it expects to return to growth by taking the new Airbus A321NEO deliveries and growing seat capacity by about 20% in FY26, according to a statement.

In Asia, trading was thin because several regional markets including South Korea’s were shut for a public holiday. Japanese markets are closed through Jan. 6. Stocks fell in Australia and mainland China, with those in Hong Kong flat. Chinese equities shrugged off data that pointed to an improvement in both services and manufacturing activity. Investors also showed little reaction to President Xi Jinping’s remark that China’s 2024 economic growth is expected to be around 5%, a target set by policymakers earlier in the year. Meanwhile, in the latest sign of simmering tensions between Beijing and Washington, the US Treasury Department said it was hacked by a Chinese state-sponsored actor through a third-party software service provider.

“Don’t think 2024 GDP growth still matters for markets actually as most have already moved towards faith that the government wants to meet the 5% target,” said Xin-Yao Ng, investment director at abrdn. “Perhaps it’s more to do with manufacturing PMI being below consensus, and within that some components like persistently soft input and output prices continue to suggest deflationary pressure.”

In FX, the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was steady, on course for its best year since 2015 in a rally fueled by Trump’s reelection in November and the Federal Reserve’s less dovish policy pivot.

In rates, Treasuries climbed, with US 10-year yields falling 1 bps to 4.52%. Gilts outperform their US peers, with UK 10-year borrowing costs down 3 bps. An  index of Treasuries looks set to eke out a small gain for the year, with yields edging lower on Tuesday.

In commodities, gold ticked higher, set for one of its biggest annual gains this century after advancing 27%. Oil reversed an earlier gain after factory activity expanded for a third month in China, the latest evidence of economic recovery in the world’s top crude importer. European natural gas prices rose in anticipation of a halt in Russian flows via Ukraine on New Year’s Day, as a transit agreement between the two nations expires. Gas for February rose as much as 2.2% on Tuesday.

US economic data calendar includes October FHFA House Price Index and S&P CoreLogic home prices at 9am, December Dallas Fed services activity at 10:30am. Fed speaker slate is blank until Jan. 3.

Market Snapshot

• S&P 500 futures up 0.2% to 5,972.75
• MXAP down 0.1% to 181.96
• MXAPJ down 0.5% to 569.61
• Nikkei down 1.0% to 39,894.54
• Topix down 0.6% to 2,784.92
• Hang Seng Index little changed at 20,059.95
• Shanghai Composite down 1.6% to 3,351.76
• Sensex down 0.2% to 78,111.50
• Australia S&P/ASX 200 down 0.9% to 8,159.14
• Kospi down 0.2% to 2,399.49
• STOXX Europe 600 up 0.1% to 505.53
• German 10Y yield little changed at 2.37%
• Euro little changed at $1.0417
• Brent Futures up 0.5% to $74.38/bbl
• Gold spot up 0.3% to $2,615.35
• US Dollar Index down 0.19% to 107.92

Top Overnight News

• China’s NBS PMIs for December are solid, with manufacturing approximately inline (50.1, down from 50.3 in Nov and slightly below the consensus forecast of 50.2) while non-manufacturing jumps to 52.2 (up from 50 in Nov and solidly above the Street’s 50.2 forecast). RTRS
• China’s government pushes for the EV industry to utilize larger amounts of domestic chips as it aims to reduce its reliance on US supply chains (about 15% of EV silicon comes from within China, and Beijing wants to move that number higher). WSJ
• China disputed US Treasury claims that it was breached by Chinese-backed hackers in a “major cybersecurity incident.” The intrusion, through third-party provider BeyondTrust, allowed access to certain workstations and unclassified documents. BBG
• South Korea’s inflation overshoots the consensus on a headline basis in Dec (+1.9%, up from +1.5% in Nov and above the consensus forecast of +1.7%) while core cools to +1.8% (down 10bp from +1.9% in Nov and slightly below the Street’s +1.9%). WSJ  
• A South Korean court issued an arrest warrant for impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol over insurrection allegations. His lawyer plans to file for an injunction. BBG
• EV sales are expected to tumble in 2025 as Trump ends the current $7500 tax credit (the US EV industry sold ~1.3M units in 2024, but that number may only be 1M in 2025). Barron’s
• Active equity funds suffered record outflows of ~$450B this year while more than $1T was pushed into ETFs as investors continue to shift to passive strategies. FT

Authored by Jingduan Yang, M.D. via The Epoch Times,

Throughout history, humans—from commoners to emperors—have sought the secret to slowing aging. In modern society, scientists continue researching nutrients that effectively combat aging. We will delve into one such nutrient that may help fight aging: taurine.

Taurine, an amino acid derived from the breakdown of proteins, is primarily found in animal-based foods, such as beef, seafood, and dairy products. It is also a common additive in energy drinks.

Taurine can also be naturally synthesized in the human body. It plays a role in energy production, assists in the processing of bile acids, and balances fluids, salt, and minerals.

Animal and Human Studies on Taurine

As we age, our bodies find it increasingly difficult to repair damage to cells, tissues, and organs, leading to a decline in our ability to combat diseases. At the same time, taurine levels in our bodies decrease with age. Scientists have thus wondered whether increasing taurine levels in the body could slow aging.

To test the potential of taurine, scientists first conducted research on animals. In a study published in the journal Science in 2023, researchers administered taurine to monkeys that were about 15 years old (equivalent to 45 to 50 human years) for six months. The results showed that compared with the control group, monkeys receiving taurine experienced increased bone density in the lumbar spine and legs, a 19 percent decrease in fasting blood sugar levels, and reductions in body weight and fat percentage. Additionally, taurine supplementation led to approximately 36 percent and 20 percent decreases in the serum concentrations of the liver damage markers aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase, respectively.

These results indicate that taurine benefits various health parameters in nonhuman primates, including body weight, bone density, blood sugar, and liver health. However, because of the relatively short observation period, the effect of taurine on the lifespan of monkeys was not analyzed, prompting scientists to conduct further research.

The researchers then fed taurine to middle-aged mice at 14 months old (equivalent to 45 human years) until their deaths. The results showed that compared with the control group, mice receiving taurine lived longer, with a 10 percent to 12 percent increase in median lifespan. These results indicate that taurine deficiency is a driving factor in mouse aging and that taurine supplementation can extend lifespan.

Moreover, significant improvement was observed in other health indicators compared with the control group. Specifically, taurine enhanced muscle strength, coordination, and bone density in mice while also improving memory, reducing anxiety, and rejuvenating their immune systems.

Does the efficacy of taurine in animals also apply to humans? One study published in Nutrition in 2022 highlighted the antioxidant effects of taurine on women aged 55 to 70. The decline in our bodies’ ability to cope with oxidative stress is a key factor that hinders our ability to repair body damage and prevent aging.

The study found that taurine supplementation can prevent the decrease of the antioxidant enzyme superoxide dismutase, thereby reducing oxidative stress during the aging process. This finding provides substantial evidence supporting taurine as an anti-aging supplement.

We know, we know – where can you get some Taurine? Right here…

Safe Supplementation Dosage for Taurine

Taurine is not considered an essential amino acid as it can be synthesized in the human body. However, taurine synthesis requires essential amino acids as precursors, making it a conditionally essential amino acid.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that supplementing with a regular dose of taurine is safe. However, what exactly constitutes a regular dose? In a human study, participants were instructed to take 1,500 milligrams of taurine daily for 16 weeks, and the results showed that this dosage was safe.

However, there is no universal standard for the appropriate dosage of taurine. Generally speaking, a healthy individual can safely supplement with 30 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day, meaning a person weighing 60 kilograms (132.28 pounds) can supplement with 1,800 milligrams of taurine. Nonetheless, following medical advice or the recommended dosage indicated on the product label when taking taurine supplements is advisable.

Considerations for Taurine Use

Certain groups of people should not take taurine, including women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, people with heart failure, and those allergic to taurine.

For most people, taking a regular dose of taurine is safe. However, it is always a good idea to consult your doctor before adding any new nutritional supplement.

Taurine absorption and metabolism vary among individuals. Excessive taurine supplementation may lead to certain side effects, such as palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, muscle stiffness, and fever. Visual problems such as blurred vision, narrowed vision, and eye pain may also occur.

For individuals taking other medications, rest assured that taurine has no known severe or moderate interactions with them. However, taurine may have mild interactions with some drugs. If you are concerned about these interactions, discuss them with your doctor.

Additionally, many foods and beverages may contain added taurine. Therefore, when taking taurine supplements, be aware of its presence in other foods.

Last but not least, it is crucial to pay attention to the source and quality of taurine products.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.