Europe

With Gulf tensions still rising, and culminating with last night's report on Arabia CNN that Qatar has put its armed forces on the highest military preparedness level, the small nation may be preparing to unveil its "Eastern pivot": moments ago Russia's RIA news agency reported that the Qatari foreign minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani will Visit Moscow on Saturday where he will hold talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

So far "Triple Threat Thursday" has been a dud. In the day with the greatest concentration of market-moving risk events so far in 2017, market action - at least for the time being - has been a whimper, with European stocks and US futures modestly higher ahead of the ECB’s rate decision and Comey's testimony (which has now been fully publicized, removing much of the risk), as the U.K. voting is underway. Asian stocks fell led by a decline in Japan as the yen first strengthened, only to tumble later in the session.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

After the Manchester suicide bombing only two weeks ago I warned my readers that the repetition of terror attacks is breeding complacency within the public, in Europe most acutely. It is not uncommon now for attacks killing dozens to be forgotten within a week of the event. The news feeds are awash in distraction, and of course, sometimes these events themselves act as distractions.

In a recent newscast of MSNBC's “Morning Joe”, BBC anchor Katty Kay stated:

Negative interest rates and the populist uprising that spurred the UK to vote for Brexit and Americans to elect Trump has helped reignite a rush into physical safe haven assets like gold and silver, which however has led to a shortage of safe venues where to store the precious metals (unlike bitcoin, gold actually has a physical dimension). And now companies that operate storage facilities for precious metals and other valuables are ramping up their capacity to help cash in on the soaring demand for storage facilities.

Authored by Ruthie Blum via The Gatestone Institute,