The first half of the year may have been forgettable for a majority of the smart money and hedge funds, with nearly 80% once again underperformingttheir benchmarks due to months of P&L crushing short squeezes, but it was a buoyant time for equity markets and virtually all asset classes, for one simple reason: a record central bank liquidity injection of over $1.5 trillion YTD.
With the US out on holiday for the 4th of July, overnight trading volumes have been muted, as Europe started off in the red but has since trimmed most losses (Stoxx 600 -0.1%) while S&P500 futures rose shaprly from session lows spurred by the European open ignoring the risk-off sentiment from North Korea's latest missile launch, trading 0.2% higher, or up 4 points to 2,429 and closing the gap to Monday's last minute tech-driven market selloff.
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: