Europe

One. Big. Squeeze...

It was quite a week for 'uncertainty' as Europe's VIX crashed to record lows, and FX and Rate vols plunged after the Fed move and Dutch elections...

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

The Dutch elections on Wednesday have provided a whole bunch of Orwellian narratives. PM Mark Rutte’s right wing VVD party, actually the ‘business’ -or should we say ‘rent-seekers’ in 2017- party, who lost some 20% of the seats they had obtained in the previous parliamentary election in November 2012, down from 41 to 33 seats, is declared the big winner. While Geert Wilders’ very right wing party, PVV, won 25% more seats -it went from 16 to 20- and is the big loser.

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.”