Europe

For some inexplicable reason, Ray Dalio still thinks the the world not only underwent a deleveraging, but that it was "beautiful." Not only did McKinsey prove that to be completely false two years ago, but for good measure the IIF confirmed as much last week, when it revealed that global debt has hit a record $217 trillion, or 327% of GDP...

... while Citi's Matt King showed that with no demand for credit in the private sector, central banks had no choice but to inject trillions to keep risk prices from collapsing.

It was already a jittery day for fixed income investors, with a bond rout which started after today's French auction was poorly received, unleashing a selling scramble and sending Bund yields above 0.50% for the first time since January 2016, and breaking out above a key support level, then crossing the ocean and slamming both US stocks and bonds. And according to Jeff Gundlach, who recently doubled down on his vocal bond bearishness on Twitter...

Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com
 
Sometime in the coming days, the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) plans to begin reporting the amount of real physical gold and silver that is actually stored in the network of LBMA vaults in London. This follows an announcement made by the LBMA on 8 May.
 
There are 7 commercial vault operators (custodians) in the LBMA custodian vault network namely:
 

In the latest diplomatic escalation between the EU and Turkey, on Thursday the European Parliament voted to suspend Turkey's EU accession talks, which as a reminder have been dragging on for decades, if Ankara proceeds with its tplanned constitutional reform which grants sweeping powers to President Recep Erdogan.

"Believe it or not, one day this will all change," warns former FX trader Richard Breslow in a shockingly frank statement of fact that most (if not all) of the current crew of market-participants are unwilling to accept all the time "the music is still playing."

Via Bloomberg,

Volatility will return, bond yields will find somewhere new to probe. Who knows, even equities might go down.