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.

But first, 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, if mostly irrelevant, topics that people around the world obsessed over in 2024.