Europe

The highly compensated world of active fund managers continued to disintegrate before their eyes in the last week, when according to EPFR data even as overall cash continued to flood into equities for a total of $14.5 billion, the 11th consecutive week of inflows, this was entirely due to allocations to ETFs, which saw $19.7 billion in inflows, the highest weekly amount YTD, offset by $5.1 billion in outflows from actively managed funds.

A quiet start to today's quad-witching St. Patrick's day, with European stocks mixed, Asian shares and U.S. index futures (-0.1%) little changed ahead of industrial production data with just Tiffany's set to report earnings.

Turkey's arch-nemesis - well, one of many -  Dutch politician Geert Wilders may have just suffered a major disappointment in his recent political career after yesterday's Netherlands general election, but that did not mean that the diplomatic scandal between Turkey and the Netherlands has been put on hiatus; on the contrary: Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu warned that Europe is headed for “wars of religion” and claiming Dutch politicians are taking the continent “to a cliff.”

While Rutte's victory in Holland has the elites and the media proclaiming the populist revolution is dead (despite a surge in Wilders' support relative to mainstream parties), movements driven by Euroskepticism and "anti-establishment" sentiment remain top of mind in all of Europe’s key elections this year.

Authored by Michael Jabara Carley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,