Europe

On Monday Russia warned that it would begin aggressively reducing its dependence on the US Dollar and US-based payment systems, and shortly after it confirmed just that when Indonesia announced that it will barter coffee, palm oil, tea and various other commodities in exchange for 11 Russian-made Su-35 fighter jets, calling U.S. and European sanctions against Russia "an opportunity to boost the Southeast Asian nation's trade."

Russia will speed up work on reducing its dependence on U.S. payment systems and the dollar as a settling currency in response to U.S. sanctions, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Monday.

When it comes to inflation in the US, there are generally two schools of thought:one is that inflation is woefully - and purposefully for political means - mismeasured, and that the real inflation is orders of magnitude higher than what the BLS, with its endless array of hedonic adjustments, reports. We discussed this view in May when we presented a presentation by Devonshire Research, which showed that "contrarian" CPI is closer to 8%, not the "post-modern" accepted rate of roughly 3%.

Two weeks ago we summarized the stunning impact that ECB Predit Mario Draghi's 'whatever it takes' efforts have had on European capital markets in one simple chart...

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