Europe

Earlier today, the world's biggest fast food retailer spooked its investors when it briefly halted trading in its stock ahead of its annual investor day. However, instead of some dramatic M&A deal revelation, McDonalds had a far less exciting announcement: it had decided to go back to basis in an attempt to recover some 500 million U.S. orders it had lost over the past five years to competition as a result of failed attempts to widen its customer base.

Via Peter K of SovereignMan.com,

I’m visiting my brother in Indonesia right now.

Being a good host, he was fixing us vodka martinis, when he realized he ran out of olives.

Both of his drivers had finished for the day so I was expecting him to compromise on the olives.

No need.

He loaded up a mobile phone app and ordered a jar of olives.

A prominent 47-year-old hedge fund trader was killed when he jumped from a luxury apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in an apparent suicide, authorities told the NY Post.

Kevin Bell, most recently head of Credit Risk at Arrowgrass Capital, jumped from a ninth-floor kitchen window at the Apthorp building on West End Avenue near West 79th Street around 7:20 a.m. He landed on scaffolding that was set up in front of the building and was pronounced dead at the scene.

This is a savage assault upon Merkel, delivered with fierce Marine Le Pen -- who called Germany a 'servant to America.' I've never seen anything quite like it, frankly. It bordered on sabre rattling before a declaration of war.

Le Pen emphatically rejected the subjugation and 'vassilisation' of Europe by Germany -- declaring her intentions to break off from it -- representative of an 'intelligent protectionism', individual liberties and defense of safety and identity.

Trump is the perfect court jester for the time, a clown sent into the three ring circus to cheer society’s forlorn and make them forget, at least temporarily, the hopelessness and banality of their existence. He could not have won in the past, and will not win in the future, but dumb luck and serendipity---plus the Democrat’s foolhardiness in selecting their most polarizing candidate ever---allowed him to seize his brief moment in time and exploit it.