While algos patiently await the only thing that matters for US stocks today which is Janet Yellen's testimony before Congress. expected to be released at 8:30 am (and previewed here), the rest of the world this morning is a hot mess of schizophrenic highs and lows.
The biggest event of the weekend, if not the month, was China's FX reserve outflow update, which at $100BN was slightly better than the $120BN expected (it pushed China's reserves to the lowest in nearly 4 years) but it was in the "no man's land" between the BofA best case scenario ($37.5BN), and the GS worst case ($197BN).
US Secretary of State John Kerry was accused of “creating ISIS” during a visit to Italy at a joint press conference with Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni. During the press conference a woman in the audience shouted “it’s you who created Daesh!”, bringing the conference to an abrupt end. RT.com reports: “It’s you who created Daesh!” she shouted at the two ministers, using another name for the terror group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), reported the Italian state-owned television channel RAI. The woman was dragged away from the conference by the Carabinieri.
Ladies and gentlemen, from the Howard Stern Show, the odds-on favorite to be your Republican Party nominee for president, Donald Trump, in a long 1997 interview with shock-jock Howard Stern, in which he discusses, among other things, how he avoided sexually transmitted diseases, how he could have had Princess Diana, whether or not he masturbates and … well, watch the whole thing, but beware, it’s very NSFW.
Two cold-blooded Ndrangheta Mafia bosses have been captured in southern Italy hiding in a ‘luxurious’ camouflaged underground bunker dug into a mountain. The pair, who fed their live victims to pigs for revenge, had been on the run for more than a decade. The Mirror reports: One of the bosses, Giuseppe Ferraro, 47, handed over one of his own captains to a rival gang during a mob feud, according to investigators. The captain was then fed alive to pigs. The other, Giuseppe Crea, 37, is a cold blooded killer who murdered the teenage son of a competitor, it is alleged.