A good detective always looks for a motive when beginning an investigation. And so, when Nick Colas discovered that the number of $100 bills printed last year suddenly spiked, the chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group decided to figure out what was going on.

The first thing he discovered, as we discuss in the attached video, is that "$100 bills are still wildly popular and growing in popularity." On the other hand, the use of smaller denomination bills ($1, $5, $10 and $20) has been declining for over a decade, as the number of cashless transactions has steadily gone up. In fact, in the fiscal year that just ended in October, Colas writes in a recent note to clients, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing cranked out 3 billion, $100 notes.

"That's substantially higher than the run-rate of the past couple of years," Colas points out, and 50% more than the 2 billion $1 bills that were inked up. "It's actually a record amount of production," he says.

All of which begs the question, why?

Part of this new demand, he says, comes from the classic nefarious sources: drug dealers, arms smugglers, tax cheats and bribes. But some of it is also due to hoarding or the fact that more people than ever, oddly enough, are losing faith in government and/or the economy and are shunning the surety of traditional investments. It's a phenomenon that's led to a huge increase in demand for gold and other precious metals, but also for — you guessed it — $100 bills.

From the moment the election ended in early November, the financial media have been dominated by a single story; the fiscal cliff. Countless hours have been spent debating the issue as lawmakers haggle over who and how much to tax, while to a lesser degree discussing how to cut spending. So entrenched are the sides in this tax-and-spend showdown that it seems the negotiators have lost all perspective and that the real goal is political victory.

"The biggest drag on the economy is fiscal policy and the fiscal cliff," says Kevin Cummins, senior U.S. economist at UBS. As it stands now, his firm (and most others on Wall Street) is expecting only 2.3% GDP growth for 2013, and even that projection is vulnerable and based on some fairly positive assumptions and continuation of recent trends in things like housing.

"What will be critical (next year) will be job growth,'' Cummins says in the attached video, adding that the U.S. Economics team at UBS is looking for hiring to accelerate to about 200,000 a month from an average of 140,000 we've had for the past six months. That said, he describes his growth forecast as "probably more back-loaded than front-loaded," predicting a slow start to 2013 followed by gradual improvement as the year progresses.

Clearly Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve get it, and have unequivocally and unilaterally used every tool in their toolbox to keep interests rates low in an effort to shield our fragile economy, for years to come, from any headwind that might push us back into recession. Every headwind, except the threat of inaction (or counter-productive action) by our government here or catching the flu, so to speak, from an ailing Europe.