Europe

Who can forget the "doom and gloom" warnings about the fate of the UK should Brexit win? Well, according to the latest confirmation received on Thursday, they were not only wrong but with an ironic twist because according to the Office for National Statistics, the UK economy grew by 0.6% in the Q4 of 2016, more than the 0.5% consensus estimate, and - more importantly - grew by 2% for all of 2016, making the UK the fastest growing economy among the G7 in the past year.

With global stock markets basking in the afterglow of Dow crossing 20,000 for the first time, on Thursday they propelled higher in sympathy with the US, as Asia and Europe are trading solidly in the green, as is the dollar which rebounded strongly off a 5 week low. Copper touched the highest price since November after reports of lower production. Global government bonds extended declines as France’s 10-year yield breached 1% for the first time in more than a year. Gold declined.

Concluding weeks of speculation, overnight Johnson & Johnson announced it agreed to acquire Actelion Pharmaceuticals, Europe’s biggest biotech company, for $30 billion, or CHF280 per share, expanding the U.S. pharma giant’s portfolio of rare-disease treatments as its top-selling drug faces new competition.

After coming out of a 2016 Presidential election cycle in which one candidate was the subject of multiple federal investigations related to illegal pay-to-play activities as well as the illegal destruction of federal records subject to a Congressional subpoena, perhaps it shouldn't be so shocking that the United States was ranked 18th on Transparency International's 2016 "Corruption Perceptions Index."  But irrespective of our expectations, here is how the United States stacks up against other countries in terms of mass corruption of our publicly elected officials and the institutions they

Submitted by Daniel Lazare via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Last week as Donald Trump was preparing to take office, The New York Times — reeling from Trump’s interview in which he said he didn’t “really care” if the European Union holds together and described NATO as “obsolete” — declared that “the big winner” of the change in U.S. presidents was Vladimir Putin.