Europe

The Trump-Putin honeymoon continues to chill... that is if Trump's top foreign policy advisors speak for the president, which remains very much unclear.

Two weeks after the White House extended sanctions on two dozen Iranian entities in retaliation for a recent ballistic missile test, Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard is set to conduct military drills next week, a senior commander announced Saturday, despite warnings from the United States not to engage in such activity and a warning from the White House which said it was putting Iran "on notice."

Concerns about a potential, and so far unsubstantiated, nuclear "incident", reportedly in the vicinity of the Arctic circle, spread in the past week after trace amounts of radioactive Iodine-131 of unknown origin were detected in January over large areas in Europe according to a report by the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, the French national public expert in nuclear and radiological risks. Since the isotope has a half-life of only eight days, the detection is an indication of a rather recent release.

Two weeks ago, Goldman analysts were stunned when they noted that in recent weeks gasoline demand in the US has collapsed to levels that suggest not all is well with the economy. In fact, as the bank's oil expert Damien Courvalin said "to achieve the 5.9% decline suggested by the weekly data, our model requires PCE to contract 6%, in other words, a recession."

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,