Europe

A few weeks ago, in what was described as one of the "worst-ever recorded attacks of its kind," the WannaCry ransomware virus spread the globe at an alarming rate, seizing control of private networks and demanding bitcoin payments to relinquish that control.  As we pointed out then, and not terribly surprisingly, those pesky "Russian hackers," the same ones that lay relatively dormant for years then suddenly emerged from hibernation in 2016 to hack the DNC, John Podesta and the entire 2016 U.S.

Less than a decade after various complex, synthetic, squared, cubed and so on securitized debt structures nearly brought down the financial system, here come "Sovereign Bond-Backed Securities."

Moments ago, the FT reported that in a watershed event for the European - and global - bond markets, Brussels is pressing for sovereign debt from across the eurozone to be "bundled into a new financial instrument and sold to investors as part of a proposal to strengthen the single currency area."

Call it securitized sovereign debt.

For all the criticism of Trump's first foreign trip, he seems to have achieved something quite unprecedented: he has united Germany's political parties in a common fury (to avoid using a harsher word) aimed squarely at the US president.

With first the Fed, and then the ECB and BOJ, all expected to start reducing their balance sheets over the next two years, a bevy of central bankers has been busy on the jawboning circuit, explaining why this would not have a major impact on either bond yields or stocks.

Tuesday's session started off on the back foot, with the Euro first sliding on Draghi's dovish comments before Europarliament on Monday where he signaled no imminent change to ECB’s forward guidance coupled with a Bild report late on Monday according to which Greece was prepared to forego its next debt payment if not relief is offered by creditors, pushing European stocks lower as much as -0.6%. However the initial weakness reversed after Greece's Tzanakopoulos denied the Bild report, sending the Euro and European bank stocks higher from session lows.