Europe

As discussed last Friday, Greece is back in the public spotlight and - hardly surprising - it is once again on the verge of collapse. Greek yields surged in the past week as the country didn’t secure a positive review at the Eurogroup on 26 January. Additional noise came from indications that the IMF still views the Greek debt as unsustainable without further measures from the Greek government (the term was "explosive"), as well as  additional debt relief clarifications from European creditors.

Submitted by Soren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

President Trump says he wants the US to have better relations with Russia and to halt military operations against Muslim countries. But he is being undermined by the Pentagon.

The commander of US forces in Europe, General Ben Hodges, has lined up tanks on Poland’s border with Russia and fired salvos that the general says are a message to Russia, not a training exercise.

The United States is a demographic time bomb, plain and simple.  Over the next 30 years, the U.S. economy will face an unrelenting demographic transition as ~75 million baby boomers exit the highest wage earning years of their life and start to draw down what little retirement savings they've managed to tuck away while wreaking havoc on the public "safety net" ponzi schemes, like Social Security, that will almost certainly be insolvent in a decade.

Submitted by Paul Brodsky via Macro-Allocation.com,

In Contrarianism in 2017 we cited the following macro dynamics that keep us cautious on equities, bullish on Treasuries and gold, and negative on credit: