Americas

President Obama delivered an interesting speech in Havana during his visit to Cuba in which he touted the benefits of normalization, promoted liberal principles, and called for an end to the embargo. Obama correctly observed that his visit to the island was the end of an outdated policy left over from the Cold War, and he said as much:

I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas. I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people.

Last June, China’s stock market miracle ended in tears.

The SHCOMP’s inexorable, parabolic ascent was to a large degree facilitated by an explosion of margin debt, the likes of which could not be found in any other major market across the globe. For instance, by the end of June, the outstanding balance of margin transactions as a percentage of the SHCOMP’s free float market cap was nearly 14% compared to just 5.5% for the S&P and less than 1% for the TOPIX.

It was just seven weeks ago when we said the following about Donald Trump and Europe’s increasingly intractable migrant crisis: “Europe’s worsening refugee crisis is in many ways the best thing that could have happened to Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign.”

• Global stocks, oil dip, but markets calm down as growth fears ease (Reuters)
• Greece cannot carry migrant burden on its own: PM Tsipras (Reuters)
• New Migrant Crisis Flares in Greece (WSJ)
• Qatar's BeIn Media buys U.S. film studio Miramax (Reuters)
• Nanny who beheaded Russian girl cites revenge for Putin's Syria strikes (Reuters)
• Elliott Management’s wager on Argentinian government bonds has yielded $2.4 billion (WSJ)
• Tesla's Getting More Rivals as VW Scandal Clouds Diesel Outlook (BBG)

Having "nailed it" with the feces-infused water for the Olympics, killed the golden goose of its economy, and unable to crackdown on widespread corruption, Brazil now has a 'great' idea to solve its utterly disastrous Zika epidemic... by zapping millions of male mosquitoes with gamma rays from drones to sterilise them.