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Today's ECB meeting is expected to be one of the most important in recent years: Mario Draghi has signaled, and is widely expected to announce a blueprint of what the central bank's QE tapering will look like beyond 2017, and while no actual tightening will be implemented - either via rates of asset purchases - the ECB is expected to announce it will cut its €60bn/month bond purchases in roughly half starting in January 2018 and lasting for the next 9-15 months.

Courtesy of RanSquawk, here are the key parameters of Thursday's meeting:

Following yesterday's US decision to decline a visa for a Justice ministry delegation, it was Germany's turn today to put the screws to Turkey. As Bloomberg reports, Germany is actively working to cut funding to Turkey from the country’s state-owned KfW bank, the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, people familiar with the matter say.

S&P futures are fractionally in the red while traders await President Trump’s pick for Fed chair and more clues on the fate of tax reform; Asian stocks slide, European shares are little changed ahead of tomorrow's ECB tapering announcement as US 10Y yields finally break out of their multi-month range below 2.40%...

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

There’s a debate raging over what, exactly, bitcoin and the thousand or so other cryptocurrencies actually are. Some heavy-hitters are weighing in with strong, if not always coherent opinions:

Jamie Dimon calls bitcoin a ‘fraud’JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon did not mince words when asked about the popularity of virtual currency bitcoin.

 

Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com

Official gold reserve updates from the Russian and Chinese central banks are probably one of the more closely watched metrics in the gold world. After the US, Germany, Italy and France, the sovereign gold holdings of China and Russia are the world’s 5th and 6th largest. And with the gold reserves ‘official figures’ of the US, Germany, Italy and France being essentially static, the only numbers worth watching are those of China and Russia.