The global oil industry is caught in a self-feeding downward spiral as falling prices cause producers to boost output even further in a scramble to service $3 trillion of dollar debt, the world’s top watchdog has warned.

The Bank for International Settlements fears that a perverse dynamic is at work where energy companies in Brazil, Russia, China and parts of the US shale belt are increasing production in defiance of normal market logic, leading to a bad “feedback-loop” that is sucking the whole sector into a destructive vortex.

“Lower prices have not removed excess capacity from the market, but instead may have exacerbated it. Production has been ramped up, rather than curtailed,” said Jaime Caruana, the general manager of the Swiss-based club for central bankers.

The findings raise serious questions about the strategy of Saudi Arabia and the core OPEC states as they flood the global crude market to knock out rivals in a cut-throat battle for export share. The process of attrition may take far longer and do more damage than originally supposed.

It’s the worst and most obvious political snow job in history. The media uses Donald Trump for ratings. Donald Trump uses the media to keep himself front and center in the Republican field, and as an object of two minutes’ hate for his crowd.

The media “attacks” Donald, knowing it will solidify his support with his crowd, and the Donald whines and moans about how “unfair” the media is to him ad nauseam. Lather, rinse, repeat.

You can get a sense for how the media really feels about things when the mask slips, and they say what they really think. With respect to Trump, that happened last week when Chris Matthews let slip his nakedly bigoted remark about not wanting to watch a debate between “two Cuban guys,” Cruz and Rubio.

In the same way, Donald Trump really has no idea what he would talk about if  he were suddenly disallowed to claim that the media was being unfair to him. Just see the video clip below.

The symbiotic relationship between Trump and the media in which they pretend to be enemies while they profit off of each other has been great for both Trump and the media, but it’s been terrible and cancerous for the Republican party. Here’s why.

Let me tell you the worst thing about the climate change scam.

It’s not the lies, not bullying, not the perversion of the scientific method, not the establishment cover-ups, not the needless scaremongering, not the wasted money, not the nannying overregulation, not the destroyed wildlife and ruined countryside, not the stymied economic growth — bad though all these things are.

No, the worst thing about the climate change scam is that the people making money out of it are the scum of the earth.

It is now the biggest ripoff scam in world history, pulling in $1.5 trillion per annum — not a penny of which goes to anything remotely useful. It is a Potemkin industry, a racket, a form of state-sanctioned organized crime.

Could there be a way to get back some of the money stolen from us by our governments to be spent on their cronies at Solyndra and BrightSource or thrown casually into grants for junk science research like “ocean acidification” or squandered on shysters at tainted institutions like NASA, NOAA and the Royal Society or wasted on anti-capitalist bureaucracies like the EPA and the Department of Energy and Climate Change?

Finally, there is.

You may have heard of the “Brexit” – Britain’s opportunity to leave the EU via a referendum. As early as this June, British voters will be asked this question: "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?"

The odds they will choose the latter greatly improved this week, with the United States slipping behind Great Britain to 11^th place in the 2016 Global Index of Economic Freedom.

What is even more striking about the 2016 index released Monday (2/01) by the Heritage Foundation is the shockingly “unfree” state of the European Union.

Greece is 138^th – between Bangladesh and Mozambique. Italy is 86^th – between Morocco and Madagascar. France is 75^th – between Kuwait and the Seychelles, and well behind Ghana and Kazakhstan.

Why would British want to be a part of this any longer?

Under President Barack Obama, the United States has been fundamentally transformed. From the land of the free and the home of the brave, seven years into the Obama presidency, America acts like the land of the overregulated and the home of the risk averse.

In the Middle East, the new America is treacherous, and pathetic. It is despised by its allies and scorned by its enemies. America’s spurned allies are making their peace with its global self-destruction. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t praying that America will come to its senses.

Unfortunately, history cannot wait forever. Time is running out. Incremental change simply will not do. The world is changing too quickly and dangerously for a hesitant successor or one that fails to recognize that the entirety of Obama’s foreign policy must be rejected from the outset.

And so, before the first votes are cast in the 2016 presidential election, who among the candidates has the courage and the competence to enact a counterrevolution in American foreign policy?

Polls confirm that Obama is the most polarizing president in recent memory. There is little middle ground: supporters worship him; detractors in greater number seem to vehemently dislike him.

Why then does the president, desperate for some sort of legacy, continue to embrace polarization?

A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly.

 The album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes.

To play the old “what if” game that is necessary in the bewildering age of Obama: what if President George W. Bush had invited to the White House a controversial country Western singer, and declared that the singer’s hit song was the president’s favorite in 2008, from an album whose grotesque cover had a crowd of NASCAR-looking, white redneck youth bunched up with an African-American official dead at their feet?

And what if the next day, Bush told the nation that he regretted not being able to bring the country together? Would there have been media calls for Bush’s impeachment?

Tearing the country apart is the unfortunate legacy of Obama—and it will continue in Pavlovian fashion until January 2017.

Hedge funds and private equity groups armed with $60 billion of ready cash are ready to snap up the assets of bankrupt US shale drillers, almost guaranteeing that America’s tight oil production will rebound once prices start to recover.

Daniel Yergin, founder of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says it is impossible for OPEC to knock out the US shale industry though a war of attrition even if it wants to, and even if large numbers of frackers fall by the wayside over coming months.

“The management may change and the companies may change but the resources will still be there,” he told me here at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The great unknown is how quickly the industry can revive once the global glut starts to clear - perhaps in the second half of the year - but it will clearly be much faster than for the conventional oil.

“It takes $10 billion and five to ten years to launch a deep-water project. It takes $10 million and just 20 days to drill for shale,” he notes. Do the math. OPEC cannot compete.