I used to just add this stuff to whatever OT essay (I hate the term "diary") on C99P.
But since so many people have signed up here, the OT essays are dropping too fast. So I'm just going to start my own OT's, and simplify it (at least for me anyway).

Obama: Don't blame me for Libya

President Barack Obama said five years after the U.S. intervened in Libya to topple then-dictator Moammar Qaddafi and prevent a bloody civil war that the plan pushed by advisers including Hillary Clinton “didn’t work” and Libya is now “a mess.”
Obama, speaking in interviews with The Atlantic magazine published Thursday, blamed lack of support from European and Gulf allies and longstanding tribal divisions within Libya for the failure of the mission intended to stabilize the country and usher in a democratically elected government.
“When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong, there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans -- given Libya’s proximity -- being invested in the follow-up,” Obama said.
The U.S. “actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected,” Obama said. “We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion -- which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict.”
“And despite all that, Libya is a mess,” he said.

Right. Because our responsibility ends when the bombs stop dropping.

Oh, BTW. We are at war in Somalia

Pentagon officials have confirmed that US ground troops were involved in a raid against an al-Shabaab-held town in Somalia, arriving by helicopter in a raid which also involved Somali forces, and which they say killed “more than 10″ fighters.

So what, right? We are everywhere. Because.

The U.S. used drones and manned aircraft yesterday to drop bombs and missiles on Somalia, ending the lives of at least 150 people. As it virtually always does, the Obama administration instantly claimed that the people killed were “terrorists” and militants — members of the Somali group al Shabaab — but provided no evidence to support that assertion.
With that boilerplate set of claims in place, huge numbers of people today who have absolutely no idea who was killed are certain that they all deserved it. As my colleague Murtaza Hussain said of the 150 dead people: “We don’t know who they are, but luckily they were all bad.” For mindless authoritarians, the words “terrorist” and “militant” have no meaning other than: anyone who dies when my government drops bombs, or, at best, a “terrorist” is anyone my government tells me is a terrorist.
...
The U.S. is not at war in Somalia. Congress has never declared war on Somalia, nor has it authorized the use of military force there. Morality and ethics to the side for the moment: What legal authority does Obama even possess to bomb this country? I assume we can all agree that presidents shouldn’t be permitted to just go around killing people they suspect are “bad”: they need some type of legal authority to do the killing.
...But al Shabaab did not exist in 2001 and had nothing to do with 9/11. Indeed, the group has not tried to attack the U.S. but instead, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage noted in 2011, “is focused on a parochial insurgency in Somalia.” As a result, reported Savage, even “the [Obama] administration does not consider the United States to be at war with every member of the Shabaab.”
...
If you’re an American who has lived under the war on terror, it’s easy to forget how extreme this behavior is. Most countries on the planet don’t routinely run around dropping bombs and killing dozens of people in multiple other countries at once, let alone do so in countries where they’re not at war.
But for Americans, this is now all perfectly normalized. We just view our president as vested with the intrinsic, divine right, grounded in American exceptionalism, to deem whomever he wants “Bad Guys” and then — with no trial, no process, no accountability — order them killed. He’s the roving, Global Judge, Jury, and Executioner. And we see nothing disturbing or dangerous or even odd about that. We’ve been inculcated to view the world the way a 6-year-old watches cartoons: Bad Guys should be killed, and that’s the end of the story.

Ukraine running out of time

Ukraine’s parliament speaker said the nation is “running out of time” to resolve its political crisis, reiterating calls for a government shake-up to end months of infighting that’s jeopardizing the flow of international aid.
Volodymyr Hroisman, who hasn’t ruled himself out of the running to lead a revamped cabinet, told a conference that Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and his team have “lost connection” with the ruling coalition in parliament. Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, herself a candidate for premier, said at the same event that Ukraine’s government isn’t in crisis and is still performing its duties.
“We must make a decision very quickly,” Hroisman said Thursday at investment bank Dragon Capital’s conference in Kiev. “We have days” to form a new cabinet, “not months. The ball’s in the prime minister’s court.”
Ukraine is embroiled in its worst political crisis since its current rulers were swept to power following deadly street protests that ousted the nation’s Kremlin-backed leader. President Petro Poroshenko and the government have become bogged down by infighting over the slow pace of reforms including a clampdown on corruption. Ukrainians and the nation’s foreign backers are losing patience. The IMF has warned that a failure to address endemic graft risks sinking a $17.5 billion bailout.

"back me or sack me"

Ukraine’s prime minister Arseny Yatseniuk has challenged president Petro Poroshenko to “back me or sack me”, saying decisive action is the only way out of the country’s month-long political crisis that risks triggering early elections and derailing pro-western reforms.

And now for the big news for the day. Guess which headline came first?

So what brought this all on? This

Mario Draghi delivered interest-rate cuts, more bond purchases and a potential subsidy to lenders in a renewed attack against the threat of deflation, before whipsawing the euro by saying the European Central Bank is done with lowering borrowing costs for now.
The 25-member Governing Council, which met in Frankfurt on Thursday, reduced the rate on cash parked overnight by banks by 10 basis points to minus 0.4 percent and lowered its benchmark rate to zero. Bond purchases were increased to 80 billion euros ($87 billion) a month from 60 billion euros, and corporate bonds will now be eligible. A new series of long-term loans to banks will begin in June.

So how much of bond purchases are we talking about? Just $1 Trillion, all for the big banks.

"This comes at a time when the pricing of bank debt is volatile and uncertain," Draghi said at a press conference after the announcement of the additional stimulus measures. The new lending program, which starts in June, provides European banks with financing "at an attractive price at a time of upcoming bank bond redemptions," he said.
Just how much debt do banks incorporated in Europe have coming due? A whopping $2.3 trillion of it maturing through the end of 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
That's a lot of money to refinance, especially when borrowing costs for European banks have been rising. Investors are demanding about 1.54 percentage points over benchmark rates to hold the firms' debt on average, up from less than a percentage point a year ago. In some cases, the rates for banks to borrow are substantially higher than that.
Earlier this year, credit investors worked themselves into a tizzy over European banks, particularly whether they'd be able to pay coupons on their contingent capital securities that are kind of like debt, kind of like stocks, and possibly riskier than both. Such securities of banks including Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and Standard Chartered plunged, spurring an even broader selloff among the firms' stocks and bonds. At the heart of the issue was concerns over souring energy and emerging-markets loans, paired with lower revenues coming from once-lucrative businesses such as debt trading.

Whatever Draghi expected to happen from this enormous money drop...it didn't happen

Europe Presses the Panic Button

Financial markets don't seem too sure whether European Central Bank President Mario Draghi is omnipotent or whether he's impotent.
The ECB sees "weaker than expected growth momentum than at the beginning of this year," Draghi said. Given that the year is only 10 weeks old, that's worrying....
Add to these measures forecasts for slower growth and inflation and a comment that interest rates probably won't fall further, and Thursday's policy splurge smacks of desperation.
The ECB toolbox looks increasingly bare; both the stock market and the euro seesawed between euphoria at the extent of the measures and dismay that Draghi saw the need to use all his firepower.

This came across the Atlantic in no time.

"Today's not a question of did (ECB President Mario) Draghi do more or less than expected. He's just doing more of what has not worked. ... We're bumping up against limits," said Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at The Lindsey Group.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 150 points, after earlier rising more than 100 points, with 3M and IBM the greatest contributors to declines and Merck leading three advancers.

In other words, the ECB is out of ammo, and they aren't alone.

The Bank of Japan's negative interest rates came into effect on Tuesday in a radical plan already deemed a failure by financial markets, highlighting Tokyo's lack of options to spur growth as global markets sputter.
The central bank, which announced the shock decision on Jan. 29, will charge banks 0.1 percent for parking additional reserves with the BOJ to encourage banks to lend and prompt businesses and savers to spend and invest.
While the announcement briefly drove down the yen and buoyed Japanese share prices, markets quickly went into reverse.
"It's getting clearer that Abenomics is a paper tiger," said Seiya Nakajima, chief economist at Office Niwa, a consultancy, referring to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's policy mix of monetary easing, spending and reform.
"The impact of monetary easing is similar to currency intervention. The first time they do it, there's a huge impact. But as they repeat it, the impact will wane," said Nakajima.
Though senior BOJ officials expected only a minor impact on Japanese banks, their stock prices plunged, contributing to a global market sell-off.

The markets are beginning to doubt the power of central banks. This could be the end of a multi-generational epic.
Even with global central banks at ZIRP and NIRP + QE (i.e. emergency levels), global liquidity is falling.