Germany

Led by a 4.3% collapse in Germany's DAX index, European Stocks plunged 2.5% today which is the worst start to a year ever. European credit markets spiked higher in risk. 10Y bund yields tumbled over 6bps and peripheral sovereign risk spreads jumped 10-15bps. Not a good start for Draghi and his pals...

Germany led the collapse...

Which has driven Stoxx 600 - the broadest European stock index - down over 2.5% for its worst start to a year ever!!

Charts: Bloomberg

With the world once again gripped by the latest Middle East snafu in which suddenly every Gulf State has found itself in the worst diplomatic crisis with Iran in 30 years which, incidentally, started after Saudi Arabia executed a Shiite cleric in its biggest mass execution yet, unleashing righteous Iranian anger at its action, many have forgotten - if only temporarily - about Europe's biggest crisis at the moment: the onslaught by over one million refugees, who are desperate to escape from the political disaster that are the broken states of Syria and Iraq.

According to a new report issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Obama administration are very concerned following Turkish President Erdogan’s public praise of Nazi Germany.  The report states that Erdogan has requesting to become a “super president” by increasing the executive powers available to him, looking at Hitler’s Germany as inspiration for a constitutional reform in Turkey.

Back in September, we noted that the US was set to send 20 new nuclear bombs to Germany each of which has four times the destructive power of the explosive dropped on Hiroshima.

“[These] new attack options against Russia” constitute “a conscious provocation of [Germany’s] Russian neighbors,” one member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats warned. Sergei Lavrov’s de facto number-two, Maria Zakharova said the move represented an “infringement of Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” 

Submitted by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

• The scramble to acquire weapons comes amid an indisputable nationwide spike in migrant-driven crime, including rapes of German women and girls on a shocking scale, as well as physical assaults, stabbings, home invasions, robberies and burglaries — in cities and towns throughout the country.