One year ago, when looking at the 20 most popular stories of 2016, we admitted that perhaps as a result of one too many shocking outcomes, it was difficult to find a coherent theme of the key events that shook the world, and which you, our readers, found most interesting and notable.

2016 was a year of shocks, twists, turns and unexpected outcomes - first the surprise Brexit vote and then Trump's just as shocking presidential victory, both of which forced many to re-evaluate what "expert", "pundit" and certainly "opinion poll" means; it also unleashed the concept of "fake news" used by the establishment to justify why it was so wrong about everything, yet which would boomerang and lead to an even greater collapse in mainstream media credibility.

2016 was year in which class warfare in the US approached unprecedented levels with antagonism between races, genders, ethnicities, ideologies, age groups and incomes all approaching peak levels, and spilling over, literally, on the street as the US public was inundated with daily reports of mass shootings, of trigger-happy policemen, of petulant students demanding conformity, of a president demanding the population hand over even more constitutional rights, of a nation torn in the most volatile presidential race yet.

it was a year of two diametrically different markets: the first half was marked by rising, and in many cases, brutal intraday volatility as global stocks entered a near bear market, offset by a sharp reversal when following the infamous "Shanghai Accord" volatility suddenly faded away, and the S&P500 set off on an unprecedented surge, rising in 21 of the subsequent 22 months, in the process recording a perfect year: 14 consecutive months of positive total returns to close the year, something never before seen in equity markets.

it was a year in which the S&P closed far higher than many had speculated, and defied the doomsayers who predicted a crash after Donald Trump won the presidential election despite the ongoing pile up of various imbalances, thanks largely to an unprecedented credit injection by China which has single-handedly been the world's biggest source of new debt creation since the financial crisis, as well as the now widely accepted support of central banks around the globe whose only mandate is to prop up asset prices or else risk another crash, a collapse in the pension system of an increasingly aging developed world, resulting in violent social upheaval

it was a year in which the geopolitical situation outside of the U.S. continued to deteriorate, although as a result of non-US intervention in Syria, we also watched the beginning of the end of ISIS which lost several key decisive battles, that would prove critical in the coming year for the terrorist organization, even as the historic refugee crisis and immigrant wave that was unleashed as a result of Syrian proxy war would alter the ethnic and demographic face of Europe for years to come, while also unleashing a wave of terrorist events as governments across the globe sought to exploit the crisis for their own selfish reasons.

In summary, 2016 was a year of confused flux and of dramatic change: change which was largely amorphous and chaotic but which we said would crystallize over 2017, "in unpredictable and, sadly, violent ways."

It did indeed, because while many of the trends observed in 2016 were taken to their logical extremes in 2017, it is difficult to say that 2017 provided much needed closure to many of the themes and narratives that emerged in the previous year and earlier, most of which played out in the political arena, where for the first time in decades, the non-establishment president of the world's biggest superpower, a manifestation of the "protest vote" that had built up over the past decade, shook to the core everything that the world had taken for granted, setting the stage for a dramatic revulsion from widely accepted norms and principles, .

As we had warned for years, the vast if silent majority, feeling snubbed and neglected by the political oligarchy and the world's central bankers, decided to take the power back which they did within the confines of the democratic process, sending the establishment reeling, by rejecting years of legacy narratives by replacing decades of a failed, and flawed, political regime in the US with something... different.

And yet, looking back over the past 12 months, it remains to be seen if these changes will be successful and bear fruit, or if they will be a change for the worse. To be sure, the defeated forces of established powers refused to go gentle into that good night and created an unprecedented McCarthyism 2.0 narrative that desperately hoped to make Trump's victory appear as the outcome of collusion with Russia... of which incidentally 14 months after the election there has still been no tangible evidence.

It is also true that while many had placed high hopes that Trump would prove to be an agent of substantial change, the president quickly doused such expectations as he rushed to surround himself with Wall Street "experts" and corporate oligarchs who promptly hijacked the post-Obama transition process resulting in... more of the same. As such it is hardly a surprise that the biggest - and really only - legislative achievement by the Trump administration, was a tax cut that benefits corporations and the wealthy first and foremost, even as it adds trillions more to the already record US debt.

Still, the simple reality is that as we entered 2017, people had enough and wanted change. This, in the words of the established media, was called "populism", and the transformation process which allowed it to take place was maligned under the umbrella definition of "fake news." More on that later.

And yet, while political upheaval was the defining feature of 2017, in a bizarre transformation never before seen, in the financial realm markets exhibited an eerie, unprecedented calm as the year progressed, ignoring and even savoring jarring headlines, even ignoring a standoff between the nuclear powers of the US and North Korea, which ultimately led to a record low volatility, best captured by this Citi chart which showed that never before in history were there so many sub 10 VIX days as there were in 2017.

To be sure, there was a reason for this historic drop in volatility, and it once again had to do with central banks, which injected a record $2.5 trillion in liquidity despite 2017 being the first year since the financial crisis which demonstrated a coordinated global economic recovery. The problem, as so many banks hinted across the year, is that it is unclear if the world economy rebounded as a result of this liquidity, which is now being withdrawn. Indeed, as a record $1 trillion in global liquidity is pulled from the system by central banks which now realize they have created a massive asset bubble, the outcome could - according to numerous skeptics - be dire.

Of course, 2017 is the year when in addition to monetary stimulus, fiscal policies started to matter again, and none more so than Trump's tax cut, which is expected to boost the economy just as inflation is gradually rebounding; should it lead to overheating it could force the Fed to hike rates even more than expected, resulting in a sharp tightening in financial conditions and ultimately a stock market drop, if not crash.

Needless to say, it would be ironic if Trump's greatest legislative achievement in 2017 is also the catalyst for the next American recession.

In this context, one of the biggest questions facing 2018 is whether this transition from monetary to fiscal policy will actually take place, and how smooth this a handover will be. For now optimism and hope prevail: global markets closed 2017 at an all time high with volatility just barely off record lows.

2017 also demonstrated how dominant the political narrative has become when it comes to finance and capital markets. For all those lamenting that relentless coverage of politics in a financial blog (which sadly also includes every tweet from Donald Trump), why finance appears to have taken a secondary role, and why the political "narrative" has taken a dominant role for financial analysts, the past year showed vividly why that is the case. After all, it was the S&P's daily "pricing-in" for over one year of Trump's fiscal and tax reform, that allowed the S&P to levitate as much as it did, and the Dow Jones to rise by 25%.

And speaking of market performance in the past year, it is also ironic that despite numerous experts predicting a correction in stocks, this never happened despite - or rather thanks to - the Trump presidency, which was also not lost on Trump himself. After declaring the S&P500 a "massive bubble", Trump has pivoted to the point where he takes daily credit for the market's record highs, something he just did on the last day of 2017.

Eventually, the time will come for Trump to pay the piper, but for now it is smooth sailing ahead for the tweeting president, who one year into his presidency has yet to see a 5% market correction. Incidentally, and speaking of twitter, as a reminder in our 2016 year end recap, we said that "2017 will be the year when domestic and foreign policy takes place on Twitter"; we were correct.

Stepping away from Trump's market boasts, the reasons for the market relentless move higher are by now clear to all: central banks have openly warned that any selling following watershed political events, or any selling period, is no longer acceptable (who can possibly forget the ECB pledging to bailout the market in case of a Brexit). Sure enough, markets took the hint, and after taking 65 days to recover all losses from the August 2015 China devaluation, it took the S&P only 5 days to recover the post-Brexit losses, it took only 16 hours to regain the sharp, limit-down drop after the Trump election, and stunningly, just 9 hours to recover the entire loss from the Italian referendum outcome which, too, was a vote against establishment politics.

This trend culminated with a stunning admission from none other than Bank of America which this month warned that not only have central banks broken the market, which now responds with furious dip buying to even the most modest of corrections, but that "In Every Market Shock Central Banks Have Stepped In To Protect Markets." The result: a habituation that nothing wrong can ever again happen, period.

The problem with this habituation that "no news can ever again be bad news" is that it is no longer clear what the market may or may not have priced in, absent hope and expectations of central bank intervention to arrest any future selling episodes; central bank intervention which in 2017 hit all time highs and numerically amounted to over $15 trillion in cumulative liquidity injections. However, with a major shift now taking place away from monetary and toward fiscal policy, the "assumption of hope" will be tested in 2018. Perhaps violently.

Another assumption that will be tested in the coming year is whether "China no longer matters" for US markets, something which was certainly not the case last year. Back in 2015, US futures would swoon the moment the PBOC announced even a modest drop in the Yuan. On the other hand, in the second half of 2016 and much of 2017, US equities could care less what Beijing did, how high NPLs among Chinese banks rose, how pervasive corporate defaults in China became, or what the future held for China, and its $40 trillion in financial assets. We have a nagging suspicion that whether or not the US manages to avoid a recession in 2018, and the business cycle is now so long in the tooth, the current expansion is now the second longest in US history, any global shock will ultimately come out of Beijing.

However, should the most powerful trend of 2017 (and prior years) persist and it most likely will, far fewer hedge funds will be there to trade this "assumption" - the one overarching trend in recent years has been a record outflow away from active managers, who saw the biggest outflows in assets under management since the financial crisis, as investors grew so disenchanted with the "2 and 20 model", they pulled their money out of the underperforming asset class and dumped it into ETFs and other, cheaper alternatives.

Still, while many themes, both in the political and financial realm, did get some closure, dramatic changes in 2017 persisted, and will continue to manifest themselves in dramatic, often violent and unexpected ways - from the unprecedented obsession with everything Trump does, says and tweets, to terrorism in Europe, to "populist" upheavals around the developed world, to unprecedented capital flight out of China. Perhaps these non-stop changes is the reason why 2017 was an absolute record year for Zero Hedge, which recently crossed 4 billion cumulative page views since inception, just over three years after hitting our first 1 billion pageview milestone.

As always, we thank all of our readers for making this website - which has never seen one dollar of outside funding (and despite amusing recurring allegations, has certainly never seen a ruble from the KGB either), and has never spent one dollar on marketing - a small (or not so small) part of your daily routine. Which also brings us to another amusing topic: that of fake news, and something we - and others who do not comply with the established narrative - have been accused of. While we find the narrative of fake news laughable, after all every single article in this website is backed by facts and links to outside sources, we find it a dangerous development, and very slippery slope, that the entire developed world - is pushing for what is, when stripped of fancy jargon, internet censorship under the guise of protecting the average person from "dangerous, fake information."

To preserve its counter-establishment aura, it goes without saying that the current administration should overturn this blatant attack on the First Amendment, and let people decide for themselves what is and isn't fake news. If anything, it is the conventional, mainstream media, most of which is owned by a handful of corporations with extensive ties to the government, that demonstrated on many occasions in 2017 that it is the primary creator and distributor of "fake news", something in which the president took particular delight.

In addition to the other themes noted above, we expect the crackdown on free speech to accelerate in the coming year, especially as the following list of Top 20 articles for 2017 reveals, many of the most popular articles in the past year were precisely those which the conventional media would not touch out of fear of repercussions, which in turn allowed the alternative media to find a key entry point, and take significant market share from the established outlets by covering topics which the public relations arm of established media outlets refused to do, in the process earnings itself the derogatory "fake news" condemnation.

We are grateful that our readers - who hit a new record high in 2017 - have realized it is incumbent upon them to decide what is, and isn't "fake news."

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Before we get into the details of what has now become an annual tradition for the last day of the year, those who wish to jog down memory lane, can refresh our most popular articles for every year during our no longer that brief, 7-year existence, starting with 2009 and continuing with 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

So without further ado, here are the articles that you, our readers, found to be the most engaging, interesting and popular based on the number of hits, during the past year.

With all that behind us, what is in store for 2018?

We don't know: as frequent and not so frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don't try despite endless allegations that we constantly predict the collapse of everything: we leave the predicting to the "smartest people in the room" who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in the last two years, which destroyed the reputation of the conventional media and the professional "polling" and "strategist" class for ever. We merely observe, try to find what is unexpected, entertaining, amusing, surprising or grotesque in an increasingly bizarre, sad, and oftentime crazy world, and then write about it.

We do know, however, that after $15 trillion in liquidity has been conjured out of thin air by the world's central banks, and the tens of trillions of credit money created (and misallocated) by China - a country which was the world's growth dynamo for the past three decades and which is now rapidly slowing down - the entire world is floating on an ocean of excess money, which for one more year has succeeded in masking just how ugly the truth beneath the calm surface is. Now, with the Fed hiking and actively shrinking its balance sheet and the ECB and BOJ set to join in the not too distant future, and as the global growth dynamics shifts from monetary to fiscal policy, as the liquidity tide starts to come out, those swimming naked will finally be exposed, especially if as we expect, the handoff from monetary to fiscal policy is far more volatile than what the market currently prices in.

The question we have: how far will the tide be allowed to recede before central banks step in again?

We are confident, however, this in the end it will be the very final backstoppers of the status quo regime, the central banking emperors of the New Normal, who will eventually be revealed as fully naked. When that happens and what happens after is anyone's guess. But, as we have promised - and delivered - every year for the past nine, we will be there to document every aspect of it.

Finally, and as always, we wish all our readers the best of luck in 2018, with much success in trading and every other avenue of life. We bid farewell to 2017 with our traditional and unwavering year-end promise: Zero Hedge will be there each and every day - on most occasions doing so with a cynical smile - helping readers expose, unravel and comprehend the fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that the system is reduced to (ab)using each and every day just to keep the grand tragicomedy going for at least one more year.