Europe

Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog,

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

Menopause, I'm told, is horrible.

Men don't know too much about it, and thankfully I've not been exposed to it... yet. One minute you're hand in hand on the beach with your sweet adoring wife and the next she's a sobbing wreck who wants to stab you in the thigh with a pair of knitting needles.

This is probably just how Qatar feels right now.

Paul Singer just became the latest investing luminary to warn that the unprecedented monetary stimulus adopted by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks in Europe and Asia has elevated market risks to their highest levels since before the great financial crisis.

“I am very concerned about where we are,” Singer said Wednesday at the Bloomberg Invest New York summit.

 

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.