Continental Resources cuts nearly $2 billion from capital expenditures budget for 2015

[GliderGuider]

15. Here's a great comment from The Automatic Earth

It's directed specifically at the Greek situation, but it bears on my point because it describes a major initial factor in the collapse.

An imperium feeds on its periphery, hollowing it out until the shell that remains collapses in on itself. Greece is the first, or at least the most visible, casualty of that process, but it won’t be the last. As the periphery is sucked dry, the centre will starve. The centre and the periphery are not determined geographically by lines on a map. The centre is the financial system, which has evolved from a highly effective parasite to an all-consuming monstrosity. That centre is laying claim to the underlying real wealth in a highly under collateralized world, where there is far too little underlying real wealth to satisfy more than a fraction of the outstanding promises it ostensibly backs.

Europe is currently in the forefront of financial crisis, but it is by no means the only part of the world facing catabolic collapse. The hollowing out performed by decades of ponzi dynamics has been very thorough, and the dominos are beginning to fall.