Europe

Over the weekend we wrote a note about how the European auto lenders are becoming just about as ridiculously undisciplined as their counterparts in the United States.  Apparently an ever-growing reliance of European millennials on lease financing has auto ABS investors worried about a potential crash in used car prices at some point in the not so distant future...that sound familiar to anyone?

But a new undercover investigation by the Daily Mail exposes just how "undisciplined" the auto lending market has become in England.  Here are the headlines:

Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

More than a year after the BREXIT referendum shocked the world, the various EU member nations are seemingly no closer to a consensus on how to deal with Europe's migrant influx.  The lack of a coordinated plan and disproportionate distribution of migrants across the continent has Italy threatening to close their ports to privately-funded aid boats until other nations "step up."   Per Yahoo News:

Via GEFIRA,

The First and the Second World War were the culmination of rivalries that go as far back as over a thousand years, when Charlemagne subjugated the Saxon tribes inhabiting modern Germany, and creating the Carolingian Empire. The political successors of Franks, France, and Saxons, the latter morphing into the Holy Roman Empire, then Prussia, then Germany, would continue to fight border wars until the bloodiest of them all, World War 2, inflicted enough destruction to both to force them to give up military means for the reciprocal arrangements.

One month ago, after the shocking collapse of the Gulf nation status quo with the announcement of the diplomatic, naval and financial blockade of Qatar by the Saudi alliance, we said that while it is unclear how this latest political fiasco plays out, one thing was certain: with Saudi Arabia and Qatar suddenly adversaries, any likelihood of a Qatari natural gas pipeline crossing Syria - the fundamental cause behind the Syria  proxy war in the first place - was gone.