As we reported earlier, while on the surface the headline revised Q3 GDP number was a stunner coming at 3.6%, the reality is that more than 100% of the growth from the initial estimate came from a revised estimate of how many private Inventories were stockpiled in the quarter. The reality was that of the $230 billion in total increase in SAAR GDP, $146 billion of this, or over 63%, was due to inventory stockpiling.

So how does inventory hoarding - that most hollow of "growth" components as it relies on future purchases by a consumer who has increasingly less purchasing power - look like historically? The chart below shows the quarterly change in the revised GDP series broken down by Inventory (yellow) and all other non-Inventory components comprising GDP (blue).

On Saturday night, I found myself at a party honouring Nelson Mandela and raising money for his children's fund (I'm still trying to figure out how I ended there). It was a lovely affair and only a very rude person would have pointed out that the party was packed with many of the banking and mining executives who refused to pull their investments out of apartheid-run South Africa for decades.

Mr. Mandela was in Canada this week to receive the highest honour my country has to offer: he was the second person in our history to be made an honorary citizen. So only someone with no sense of timing would have mentioned that, as the Liberal government was honouring Mr. Mandela, it is ramming through an anti-terrorism bill that would have sabotaged the anti-apartheid movement on several fronts had it been in place at the time. (Many other countries are passing similar laws.)

The anti-apartheid movement here in Canada and elsewhere actively raised money for the African National Congress, which would easily have fit most anti-terrorism bills' sloppy definitions of a terrorist organization. Furthermore, anti-apartheid activists deliberately caused "serious disruption" to the activities of companies invested in South Africa, eventually forcing many to pull out. These disruptions would also have been illegal under most proposed anti-terrorism laws.

In the summer of 1990, four months after being released from prison, Nelson Mandela went on a triumphant tour of the United States. I remember his visit to Boston where he spoke before a crowd of 250,000 gathered on the Esplanade. It was a festive atmosphere with lots of bands playing music from different parts of the world, families with children, ordinary people, and activists, young and old. The sense of hope was palpable. In South Africa, the people had won! There was even hope that Boston's troubled racial history of the 1970s and 1980s could be overcome. The mayor at the time, Ray Flynn, recalled the event:

"It was the first time that I recall standing and looking out at a massive audience and seeing white and black, young and old, people from the neighborhoods, people from the suburbs," Flynn said. "It was almost like a Celtics celebration, only this had a greater significance than even that."

Just a few months earlier, the Berlin Wall had fallen in November 1989. People were crossing boundaries and breaking bonds that had held them back. Not all the uprisings were successful, the Tiananmen Square uprising in China in June 1989 was brutally suppressed, but overall you could feel the sense of hope for a better world.

There was only one problem. In the United States, the Bush family was in power. If there was one thing the Bushes could not abide, it is ordinary people rising up against their oppressors. That sort of thing goes against their whole business model. So the sense of hope had to be crushed, and sure enough, just several weeks after Mandela's tour, the world was plunged into what felt like something from the 1930s when Iraq invaded Kuwait. There were news reports of forces massing on the border with Saudi Arabia. An old-style war between invading nation states? Could this really be happening?

As the world remembers Nelson Mandela's legacy as South Africa's first black president and anti-apartheid icon, he was also deeply skeptical of American power, the Iraq invasion, and was a key supporter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Here are seven quotes from the leader that are less likely to be published as his life is honored and his death commemorated in the mainstream media.

Prior to the US invasion of Iraq, Mandela slammed the actions of the US at a speech made at the International Women's Forum in Johannesburg, declaring that former President George W. Bush's primary motive was 'oil', while adding that Bush was undermining the UN.

"If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings," Mandela said.

REP. BOB GOODLATTE (R-VA): Professor Turley, the constitution, the system of separated powers is not simply about stopping one branch of government from usurping another. It's about protecting the liberty of Americans from the dangers of concentrated government power. How does the president's unilateral modification of act of Congress affect both the balance of power between the political branches and the liberty interests of the American people?

Yesterday, President Obama appealed to fellow Americans to help him focus Congress on efforts to stem the unprecedented income inequality in our Nation. Tonight, one of the denizens of the greed-is-good corporate front groups, Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute, will attack that message in a speech at NYU.

New York University presents an ideal forum for Brook. It's a microcosm of the pitched battle for the soul of America. The Wall Street cartel has oozed itself into NYU's boards, municipal bond issuance, student loans, mortgage loans, credit cards and naming rights on buildings and auditoriums. NYU now has the highest tuition in the country, crippling student debt, while it simultaneously doles out forgivable loans to elite administrators for mansions in the suburbs.

As a determined group of over 400 faculty attempt to restore the University to its core educational mission and reduce the need for student loans, they are being maligned by the pro Wall Street university leadership much as any populist message is maligned on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.

In a speech hosted by the Center for American Progress yesterday, the President said the U.S. now ranks along the lines of Jamaica and Argentina in terms of income inequality. "The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income - it now takes half," said the President. "Whereas in the past, the average CEO made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today's CEO now makes 273 times more. And meanwhile, a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country."

Young Americans are turning against Barack Obama and Obamacare, according to a new survey of millennials, people between the ages of 18 and 29 who are vital to the fortunes of the president and his signature health care law.

The most startling finding of Harvard University's Institute of Politics: A majority of Americans under age 25--the youngest millennials--would favor throwing Obama out of office.

The survey, part of a unique 13-year study of the attitudes of young adults, finds that America's rising generation is worried about its future, disillusioned with the U.S. political system, strongly opposed to the government's domestic surveillance apparatus, and drifting away from both major parties. "Young Americans hold the president, Congress and the federal government in less esteem almost by the day, and the level of engagement they are having in politics are also on the decline," reads the IOP's analysis of its poll. "Millennials are losing touch with government and its programs because they believe government is losing touch with them."

The results blow a gaping hole in the belief among many Democrats that Obama's two elections signaled a durable grip on the youth vote.

Indeed, millennials are not so hot on their president.

Obama's approval rating among young Americans is just 41 percent, down 11 points from a year ago, and now tracking with all adults. While 55 percent said they voted for Obama in 2012, only 46 percent said they would do so again.

The eulogies from Israeli leaders in response to the death of Nelson Mandela are pouring in. What goes unspoken in their remembrances is that Israel had a close relationship with the South African apartheid regime. Here's an excerpt from Sasha Polakow-Suransky's groundbreaking book that delves deep into the alliance. Titled "The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa," it was published in 2010.

On April 9, 1976, South African prime minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster arrived at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem with full diplomatic entourage in tow. After passing solemnly through the corridors commemorating those gassed in Auschwitz and Dachau, he entered the dimly lit Hall of Remembrance, where a memorial flame burned alongside a crypt filled with the ashes of Holocaust victims. Vorster bowed his head as a South African minister read a psalm in Afrikaans, the haunting melody of the Jewish prayer for the dead filling the room. He then kneeled and laid a wreath, containing the colors of the South African flag, in memory of Hitler's victims. Cameras snapped, dignitaries applauded, and Israeli officials quickly ferried the prime minister away to his next destination. Back in Johannesburg, the opposition journalist Benjamin Pogrund was sickened as he watched the spectacle on television. Thousands of South African Jews shared Pogrund's disgust; they knew all too well that Vorster had another, darker past.

Although the idea of impeaching President Barack Obama has been mentioned often in right-wing media outlets and amongst the President's more conservative constituents, the issue has not been seriously proposed by members of Congress.

Now, however, the idea has at least been mentioned in an official Congressional meeting.

In a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Republican representatives mentioned the possibility of what Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) referred to as the "I-word," according to Talking Points Memo.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) assured the rest of the members of the committee that they would not bring up the possibility unless they were certain that they wanted to consider going forward with the process, explaining that the "I-word" is "the word that we don't like to say in this committee, and I'm not about to utter here in this particular hearings."

Indebted governments may soon consider a big one-time levy on capital assets.

Between ObamaCare, Iran and last quarter's uptick in U.S. economic growth, taxpayers these days may be distracted from several dangers to come. But households from the United States to Europe and Japan may soon face fiscal shocks worse than any market crash. The White House and New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio aren't the only ones calling for higher taxes (especially on the wealthy), as voices from the International Monetary Fund to billionaire investor Bill Gross increasingly make the case too.

In his November investment commentary for bond giant Pimco, Mr. Gross asks the "Scrooge McDucks of the world" to accept higher personal income taxes and to stop expecting capital to be taxed at lower rates than labor. As for the IMF, its latest Fiscal Monitor report argues that taxing the wealthy offers "significant revenue potential at relatively low efficiency costs." The context for this argument is the IMF's expectation that in advanced economies the ratio of public debt to gross domestic product will reach a historic peak of 110% next year, 35 percentage points above its 2007 level.