Europe

European and Asian stocks, S&P futures, bond yields, the dollar and commodity metals are rose, in some cases making new all time highs, lifted by the latest reemergence of the "Trump trades" as hopeful investors once again bet that the U.S. president's tax reform plans will boost economic growth and corporate profits, despite another warning from Goldman that the president's fiscal plan is about to be derailed.

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Earlier this week I was talking in Athens to a guy from Holland, who incidentally with a group of friends runs a great project on Lesbos taking care of some 1000 refugees in one of the camps there. But that’s another topic for another day. I was wondering in our conversation how it is possible that, as we both painfully acknowledged, people in Holland and Germany don’t know what has really happened in the Greek debt crisis. Or, rather, don’t know how it started.

Submitted by George Friedman via MauldinEconomics.com,

Donald Trump deeply upset the Europeans when he raised the possibility that NATO is obsolete and that the European Union is failing.

But this isn’t the first time these issues have been discussed. I wrote about it last year, and the conversation has only continued.

What Trump has done is simply bring into the open the question of Europe’s relationship with the US.

The missions and motives of NATO and the EU

Submitted by Flemming Rose and Jacob Mchangama via The Washington Post,

Remember George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth? In his dystopian novel “1984,” its purpose was to dictate and protect the government’s version of reality. During the Cold War, Orwell’s book was banned behind the Iron Curtain, because readers perceived the novel as an allegory for their own repressive regimes.

With the December monthly TIC data due out this week, bond traders will be closely watching if the selling of US Treasuries by foreign accounts, and especially central banks, which as we have repeatedly shown for the past several months has hit record levels...

... will persist, with a focus on whether China's near record selling of US paper will persist.

However, this time the surprise may not be China, but its nemesis across the East China Sea, Japan.