Europe

While the track record of the Sunday Times over the past 24 hours is somewhat spotty, following a report that as his foreign trip abroad once officially president, Trump is planning a summit with Putin in Reykjavik, which in turn was promptly denied by Trump staffers who called the story "fantasy", overnight the paper also reported that UK Prime Minister Theresa May will announce that Britain is "seeking a clean and hard Brexit" in a speech this week that will promise to create a “strong new partnership” with the European Union.

We start our Sunday with some gloomy predictions from Morgan Stanley's appreciately named "Sunday Start" periodical, in which the bank's Chief Global cross-asset strategist, Andrew Sheets, explains why the market return under the Obama administration will be a tough act to follow. His argument in a nutshell: "good market environments often involve a shift from economic despair to optimism, and a shift in psychology from ‘fear’ to ‘greed’. Both occurred over the last eight years, producing returns well above the long-run average.

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

2016 brought a lot of changes, or rather, brought them to light. In reality, the world has been changing for many years, but many prominent actors benefitted from the changes remaining hidden. Simply because their wealth and power and worldviews are better served that way.

Europe’s Courageous Journalism Voice Has Passed Away

Paul Craig Roberts

On January 13, Udo Ulfkotte died, reportedly of a heart attack.

Ulfkotte had been an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitzung.
He published a courageous book in which he said that the CIA had
a hand on every significient journalist in Europe, which gave Washington
control over European opinion and reduced knowledge of and opposition to Washington’s control over European heads of state. Essentially, there are no European governments independent of Washington.

Human Rights Watch is placing President-elect Donald Trump on a list of people who they deem a “threat to human rights”. The organization say that Trump’s political philosophy promotes intolerance and spreads hatred throughout America. “Donald Trump’s election as US president after a campaign fomenting hatred and intolerance, and the rising influence of political parties in Europe that reject universal rights, have put the postwar human rights system at risk,” the group announced.