Deflation is not the cause, its a symptom. Trying to spur inflation when the economy can't hold itself with costs as is creates worse results than not doing anything. Let the market resolve itself or we will have downturns as bad or worse than the last downturn caused in part by Federal Reserve mismanagement and extension of the business cycle.

Not real war, economic war fought with dumping crude to get marketshare. That is if Iran ever gets to dump given its playing with missile technology now.

LOL we have to get through 2016 before we hit 2017 and it's not looking good. Of course there were plenty of economic signals pointing down the end of 2016 which weren't easily manipulated by the Federal Reserve's easy money policies. 2017 will likely depend on if the US decides to allow normal downturns to correct the market inefficiencies that aren't being addressed including a socialized real estate market financed by loading houses on people who shouldn't buy them (Fannie Freddie and other gov programs), TBTF banks that are even bigger that hoard money, run inefficiently, gamble, and destroy the rest of the financial market with government protections which taxpayers can't and shouldn't pay for, Federal reserve policies that discourage capital spending in favor of stock buybacks and paper games, artificial asset based stimulus which is not sustainable and make downturns worse not better, a resurgence of student costs due to government financing of student loans absurd rises in tuition from it, and crooks taking advantage of their blocking of clearing their debt through bankruptcy, the even greater growth of junk financing and the fact that it is now even larger and being marketed to people in packages similar to the bad home loans during the last downturn.

This is just a few of the issues. Hopefully we will resolve some of these in 2016 before we roll around to 2017.

If it does it's liable to be negative for both.

China's issue is compounded by the fact that it restricts its own money from exiting thus, if allowed to exit, would drive its currency down even further. As long as it prevents the free exchange of money and tries to manage it like a command economy, it will face worse and worse problems. This is only a beginning made worse by a rising US dollar. If the US hits a recession the dollar will get even stronger making their position indefensible.

As you can see with your graph the market is merely regressing back from the run up since the last weakness showed up. Moreover the selloff is orderly and mostly being done by big money. Thus although the news screams like there's a meltdown the correction is merely just that unless their wailing causes a read crash.

Furthermore, this downturn has little to do with China despite the medias insistence otherwise. Friday was a good example of it. The market is responding to the fundamental changes and weakness in the US economy and bad corporate profit growth given the price the US market is at. Yes the end of zirp has some effect, but corporate profitability has been getting weak and has been sustained in the market due to stock buybacks, debt issues, buying of competition, etc. These are not sustainable long term and worse yet the Fed's policy has lead to a massive drop in capital expenditure which is an investment in future growth.

The US needs to let the market correct which it didn't do adequately last time due to government and Fed intervention. Thus eventually we are doomed to repeat bad cycles until the economy is allowed to correct itself which required the normal business cycle of downturns.

The year turned out good from what it could have been. Although a bad downturn could be this year too. Those encouraging you to gamble more and more in stocks because of low rates need to be pointed out as the self serving fools who could care less if you lose it all that they are. In fact fee structures insures most only care about their take to shovel you into a billion mutual funds that mimic each other and charge absurd fees doing it. Ergo, most of them lost you money when the market is flat.

The author is right that the telecom sector has increasing threats and is in danger due to their presumed monopolistic practices. Comcast indeed has had problems but so has AT&T and others in the industry. It's main roots lie in lack of regulators preventing consolidation for the pure reason of quashing competition. The good thing is technology keeps creating new ways of allowing service to bypass monopolies that think they have the customer trapped in their bad service and overprices schemes.

Comcast is not the worst of these although they are getting worse over time.

Yawn, sadly oil is now filled with giant speculators which is the main reason for the run-up in the first place, the overproduction, and now the downturn. Rather than learning their lesson, banks and financial institutions have been encouraged by TBTF banking and the revocation of Glass Stegall to make the commodities market a Las Vegas casino that allows cheating. Avoid joining the speculator craze for your own good.

Better yet, write Washington to re-impose Glass Stegall and break up the TBTF banks.

This isn't a positive sign. Most likely the feud between the oil giants will lead to more output not less as they fight over exports. Likewise, if it leads to war the US may experience inflation as well as economic stagnation as the economy feels the oncoming of a cyclical downturn made worse by the Fed's overly easy money policies of the past.