Europe

From "Blain’s Morning Porridge – May 16th 2017" by Bill Blain of Mint Partners

      “Now all them things that seemed so important, well mister, they vanished right into the air….”

I’ve been very fortunate this morning to spend 30 minutes in the company of perhaps the wisest man in the whole of London. Stuck in traffic on the way back from the West End, I discovered my mini-cab driver has a better approach and strategy for dealing with the daily misery that is modern life than any investment professional I’ve ever met.

Authored by Alex Gorka via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Authored by Peter Pry, chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission, op-ed via The Hill,

Since Sept. 11, 2001, analysts have been increasingly concerned terrorists might steal, buy, build, or be given a nuclear weapon — and the War on Terrorism would become a nuclear war. The Department of Homeland Security’s National Planning Scenario #1 is detonation of a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, in a location such as New York City or Washington, D.C. 

Modeled after similar programs in Europe, Australia and Canada, Seattle is on track to become the first city in the United States where heroin addicts can legally shoot up at a supervised healthcare facility.  The controversial program is intended to reduce the number of overdose deaths by bringing users out of the alleys and into "safe places" where overdoses can be treated immediately, all at taxpayer expense, of course.  This new concept goes one step beyond needle exchange programs that exist in other cities intended to decrease the spread of disease through dirty needles.

With the French election in the rearview mirror, Europe's anti-establishment wave seemingly receding, and Merkel's crushing victory (and stunning defeat for the SPD) in this weekend's North Rhine-Westphalia election in Germany, some strategists have gone so far as to say there is virtually no political risk left in Europe (and certainly looking at a chart of Eurostoxx50 Vol or European credit spreads, this appears to be the case). To be sure, stocks have been ahead of the curve, with European YTD returns trouncing those in  the US, and some pundits saying there is much more upside to come.