Europe

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

By January 1920, much of Europe was in total chaos following the end of the first World War.

Unemployment soared and steep inflation was setting in across Spain, Italy, Germany, etc.

But an Italian-American businessman who was living in Boston noticed a unique opportunity amid all of that devastation.

He realized that he could buy pre-paid international postage coupons in Europe at dirt-cheap prices, and then resell them in the United States at a hefty profit.

There is a certain, and very tangible, irony in the central banks' response to the Global Financial Crisis, which was first and foremost the result of unprecedented amounts of debt: it was to unleash an even greater amount of debt, or as BofA's credit strategist Barnaby Martin says, "the irony in today's world is that central banks are maintaining loose monetary policies to generate inflation…in order to ease the pain of a debt "supercycle"…that itself was partly a result of too easy (and predictable) monetary policies in prior times."

“We had a banking crisis, a fiscal crisis and we spent lot of the tax-payers’ money – in the wrong way, in my opinion – to save the banks” outgoing Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem said adding “so that the people criticizing us and saying that everything was being done for the benefit of the banks were to some extent right.”

Yesterday's Japan flash-crash inspired selling continues for a second day, with global equities - and bonds - sliding early Friday on concerns U.S. tax reform - and corporate tax cuts - will be delayed after Senate Republicans unveiled a plan that differed significantly from the House of Representatives’ version. After suffering their biggest plunge in 4 months on Thursday, European stocks failed to find a bid along with Asian stocks, while U.S.