Europe

While central banks step away from the spotlight, as does Asian data and markets with China and South Korea both taking a weeklong break, there will be a bevy of central bank speakers to "explain" what is going on while it will be a busy week data wise, with the US employment trade balance report due this week, PMI and retail sales in Euro area, as well as PMI and house prices in UK. The key central bank events include the Australia RBA board meeting, ECB minutes,Yellen and Fed member speeches. In Emerging Markets, there are monetary policy meetings in India, Poland and Romania.

U.K. leisure carrier Monarch Airlines filed for insolvency on Monday, the biggest ever failure of a British airline, stranding tens of thousands of travellers overseas and prompting the country’s biggest-ever peacetime repatriation effort, as the government has to find a way to to arrange the return of 110,000 tourists, and marking the third failure of a major European operator in five months. Monarch cancelled about 300,000 future bookings and apologized to customers and staff as it became the UK’s largest carrier to go into administration, according to Reuters.

While S&P futures were modestly higher, rising 0.1% in a quiet session in which China, South Korea, India and Hong Kong were closed for holidays, the Euro, Spanish stocks and bonds were broadly lower as Spain faces its worst constitutional crisis in years following a dramatic, violent crackdown on Sunday's Catalan independence referendum in which 89% of the voters wanted to secede from Spain.

For a new generation of nationalists (by which they clearly imply tin-foil-hat wearing, nazi-sympathizing, probably-drug-taking, conspiracy-theory-loving wonks), The FT's Gideon Rachman explains - for those not willing to think for themselves, or follow the money, that the billionaire investor has become the perfect villain...

George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, has had a busy year.

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

I’ve seen a lot of videos and photos of the Catalonia attempt to hold a referendum today (Tyler has a “nice” series of them), and what struck me most of all, apart from the senseless violence police forces were seen to engage in, is the lack of violence on the side of protesters.