Europe

It appears the chairmen of UBS have plenty to say on Europe.Following former UBS chairman Peter Kurer's comments that "to the elites, the EU is a means to get rich quickly and export their problems," UBS current chairman Axel Weber has warned bankers that Europe is not "out of the woods" from its political risks even after Emmanuel Macron’s reassuring victory in the French presidential election.

Peter Kurer recently remarked on the end of the Euro...

Excerpted from The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, March 2017, authored by Mark Faber; via MauldinEconomics.com,

Writing for https://www.dailybeast.com (February 4, 2017), Joel Kotkin opines under the title “The High Cost of a Home Is Turning American Millennials Into the New Serfs” that

Paris’ Gare du Nord train station, one of the city's major transportation hubs and the busiest train station in Europe, was evacuated on Monday as armed police searched for three "dangerous" terror suspects. The station was cordoned off around 11pm local time as dozens of police officers and transport staff evacuated and surrounded the large station in northeast Paris and sealed off all roads leading in as local residents milled around.

The confetti were still littering Paris from Macron's celebration event on Sunday night when the 39-year-old Frenchman became the youngest president in French history, and already he met with one of the biggest challenges facing his new administration: a population, mostly among the local labor unions, that is unwilling to accept any if not all of the proposed economic reforms, and made this abundantly clear on Monday by clashing in violent protests across Paris with the local riot police.

Authored by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

First mistake: Emmanuel Macron’s handlers played Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” instead of the French national anthem at the winner’s election rally. Well, at least they didn’t play “Deutschland Über Alles.”

The tensions in the Euroland situation remain: the 20 percent-plus youth unemployment, the papered-over insolvency of the European banks, and the implacable contraction of economic activity, especially at the southern rim of the EU.