The issue with paper gold is the same, those printing it are just making more of it despite the fact there isn't even enough gold to back all the funny paper they already made. I don't see an end to this and after China makes a gold paper market as well we will have even more government backed fake gold paper writers on the market trying to make money by writing gold paper and doing all sorts of things to prevent from ever paying out in gold because they don't have enough.

Sadly the downturn is already underway. Also an issue is its VAT tax which is so high it hurts economic growth and yet can't make enough money for the governments that are already overblown and inefficient. The whole of Europe needs reform away from socialism and more for a free market economy that can support it.

The public must get wise and curb regulatory powers and demand captured regulatory bodies get disbanded or fired. The central bank must never be given the power to print its own liquidity and must represent the public rather than be a bankers union focused on how to keep their banks alive, enrich their execs, and give power to themselves at the cost of our democracy.

We have the tools, democracy and a free market even though the free market is getting gradually distorted and dissolved.

Welcome to Central planning. don't expect logic to rule, it certainly doesn't. Don't look for market signaling because the central banks main objective it to negate them. what type of people will we have with this type of market, dumb, corrupt, and very poor people because central banks abhor people who save and don't run debt.

1) The US dollars' rise is due to the fact that its bond selling dollar devaluation scheme is going somewhat wrong. First other countries are now devaluation by the same ridiculous means the US did. Second is the Federal Reserve balance sheet now looks like a overleveraged brokerage firm with stuff they can't mark to market making more QE seem a but absurd. the rising dollar is not good for the US save there is more bond demand.

2) China has a property issue, however it pales compared to the US which has decided to socialize 90% of property through state run entities Fannie and Freddie to keep the market afloat. even then the Federal Reserve must bail them out by giving them liquidity regularly so they can have liquidity to finance more home loans at rates that don't cover default risk and rate rises. The US real estate market is socialistic except when it comes to losses, then it's capitalistic with banks losing nothing and individuals losing it all. This is corruption on both sides.

As for cross citizenship, the US has the same issue mostly for tax dodging. In reality, allowing dual citizenship forces countries to be more equitable to at least its dual holding citizens because it introduces a free market capitalism concept called choice.

3) Russia plays oil games with Europe but the US plays oil games against its own people enabling monopolistic and oligopolistic power to those that pay politically to corner the market in regions and artificially raise prices on the public. California is a good example. Oil is a dirty game. It always has been. The US is in the midst of the biggest glut in oil and prices haven't gone down to pre-recession levels. To keep this from happening oil companies are now trying to export oil so they can justify the price of continuing to import oil. Efficiency is never the model in corrupt business plans to hike prices using the government to screw their own population.

I agree that Russia will rue the day it lost its monopoly oil supply to East Europe. Vacuums always get filled unless prevented by anti-capitalistic regulations that gift monopoly power to a few suppliers like in California.

Well you can buy it up yourself at artificially low yields by expanding your balance sheet if your the federal reserve and you want to buy long term treasuries in your own auction. Otherwise one would accuse you of fraud.

You could ask not to have to revalue the asset like TBTF Banks did with property, which now holds lots of rotting homes and claims they are worth the same price as the last crash.

If you're connected like the big brokerages you could ask the Federal Reserve to secretly buy them at an inflated price and ask the government to block reporting to the public the enrichment of those at taxpayer risk (since the Federal Reserve is backed by the taxpayer and the bond moves onto their balance sheet). Of course the Federal Reserve doesn't want to be audited either and likes illiquid shares because it doesn't have to mark them to market.

Oh sorry, you're an individual. In that case, you have to sell at a massive loss to one of these guys and then they play one of the above games so they don't have to sell them until the market recovers.

So much for capitalism, fairness, equality, and accounting.

Ridiculous, it is not Ebola that dropped the market today, it's the result of the effects of years of terrible monetary policies by the Federal Reserve and government that are now being felt. Mainly those are planned economy, endless free money to TBTF banks, socialization of property loans through Fannie and Freddie, policies of money creation that reward mainly banks for doing nothing, perversion of risk reward in stocks, and the general rejection and destruction of free market signaling and capitalism replaced by increasing socialism and dependence on government and central bank feeding frenzies that bear no logic to the real economy or rational thought but encourage wreckless spending and penalizes all but banks from accruing capital.

This behavior is a flat out denial of capitalism and needs to end.

Worse even than the penalty is that the tax subsidy will be cancelled which Apple has been taking advantage of. apple's tax games are catching up to them. I wonder when the US will come down on them for locking their profit up in China to avoid US taxes.

The market's response t the ECB's moves towards what the US has been doing is interesting. It is amazing the world allows fuddy duddy monetary printing and expansive overleveraged central bank balance sheets in the US without a whisper yet all hell breaks out when the EU mentions anything approximating half of it.

Of course some in the EU are more government run and more fiscally unbalanced than the US, however, if the US takes into account the mass of home loans, TBTF bank obligations as state backed banks which they essentially are now, and obligations under its belt may deserve a second look.

Sadly most investors are on autopilot dumping investment funds into routine and predominantly bad mutual funds. This hasn't abated since the last downturn.

As for all bull and all bear cases I tend to agree, however, one should look at the market as a tide. There is a time to get in, usually at the bottom, and a time to get out usually at the top somewhere around 4-7 years. To deny the business cycle is to believe you are not in a capitalist system or to be as blissfully ignorant as a weatherman who doesn't believe winter will ever come again. Right now the cycle favors the bear, you better watch out even if the US keeps trying to delay a downturn by perverting the free economy.