Europe

In October, Merkel won what was dubbed as the “nightmare victory” in the German elections. The weaker expected showing from the CDU/CSU forced her into complicated coalition negotiations with the FPD and the Greens. This process is coming to a head due to tomorrow’s self-imposed deadline to find enough common ground to press forward with the alliance. This alliance is the so-called “Jamaica” coalition since the colours of the parties mirror Jamaica’s flag. As Reuters reports.

It's that time of the year again when with just a few weeks left in the year, Goldman unveils its top trade recommendations for the year ahead. And while Goldman's Top trades for 2016 was an abysmal disaster, with the bank getting stopped out with a loss on virtually all trade recos within weeks after the infamous China crash in early 2016, its 2017 "top trade" recos did far better.

After five consecutive daily losses on the MSCI world stock index and seven straight falls in Europe, there was finally a bounce, as investors returned to global equity markets in an optimistic mood on Thursday, sending US futures higher after several days of losses as global stocks rebounded following a Chinese commodity-driven rout. 

Authored by Nikolas Gvosdev via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Will a future, formal Trump-Putin summit be a game changer?

Last week, I noted that any encounter between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that would take place at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Da Nang, Vietnam, would have to address two critical questions if there was to be any clarity in U.S.-Russia relations.

We’ve now gotten a first draft of answers.

Was Brexit also Putin’s fault?

The simmering anti-Russia hysteria that has emerged in the UK recently has finally boiled over, and it appears last night’s story in the        Times of London claiming that a swarm of Twitter bots reportedly created by a troll farm possibly linked to Russian intelligene (sound familiar?) posted more than 45,000 messages about Brexit in 48 hours during last year’s referendum to try and “so discord” among the public was the grain of rice that tipped the scale.