France

Just as US equity futures were about to roll over following some very substantial misses yesterday by the likes of Google, Microsoft, Starbucks and a plunge in Visa shares, overnight who came to the markets' rescue but the BOJ, when shortly after midnight Bloomberg reported that "according to people familiar with talks at the BOJ" which is the traditional keyword for a BOJ source testing out the market's reaction, Japan's central bank may "help" local banks to lend by offering a negative rate on some loans.

McDonalds have been fined $341 million dollars (300 million euros) for unpaid taxes in France after French discovered that the fast food corporation had funnelled cash through Luxembourg and Switzerland as part of a huge tax avoidance scheme.  French authorities have accused the fast food giant of taking advantage of a Luxembourg-based entity, McD Europe Franchising, in order to dump their profits and fool the government. Reuters.com reports: McDonald’s France declined to comment on developments in the ongoing French tax investigation, first reported in 2014.

Submitted by Giulio Melli via The Gatestone Institute,

• Among young European Muslims, support for suicide bombings range from 22% in Germany to 29% in Spain, 35% in Britain and 42% in France, according to a Pew poll. In the UK, one in five Muslims have sympathy for the Caliphate. Today more British Muslims join ISIS than the British army. In the Netherlands, a survey shows that the 80% of Dutch Turks see "nothing wrong" in ISIS.

Submitted by Judith Bergman via The Gatestone Institute,

• Erdogan has boasted that he is proud of boldly blackmailing EU leaders into paying him protection money.

• Erdogan's threats were almost criminally sinister: "... the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?"

Submitted by Dan Steinbock via The Difference Group,

As the Eurozone is amid secular stagnation, its old fiscal, monetary and banking challenges are escalating, along with new threats, including the Brexit, demise of Schengen, anti-EU opposition and geopolitical friction. According to Dan Steinbock, Brussels can no longer avoid hard political decisions for or against an integrated Europe, with or without the euro.