Europe

While currency and fixed-income traders are having second thoughts about the extent of the Trump reflation trade just days before the inauguration of the 45th U.S. president as Bloomberg's Vincent Cignarella writes, most readily observed in the recent 50% drop in 10Y real yields, which have slid from 0.74% in mid-December to just 0.38% in the past month, it is still far too early to call the time of death on the Trump rally.

Udo Ulfkotte: “German Politicians Are US Puppets”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/german-politicians-are-us-puppets-german-journalists-are-urged-to-bias-their-writings-in-favor-of-the-us/5412731

Udo Ulfkotte: Mainstream Media Is A CIA Operation

One month ago we reported that having successfully avoided a calamity for most of 2016 despite being massively net short, somewhere to the tune of around -90%, at times rising as high as -105%, Horseman Globa, finally had a bad month. In fact, losing -12.80% in November the hedge fund which we previously dubbed "the world's most bearish hedge fund" due to its staggering net bearish bias, had just suffered its worst month in history as "the short book, the bond book and the forex book lost money."

Dr Udo Ulfkotte, the former German newspaper editor whose bestselling book exposed how the CIA controls German media, has been found dead. Ulfkotte was an editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the largest newspapers in Germany, when he published Bought Journalists, the bestselling book that cost him his job and perhaps his life. He was 56. German media, who were banned from reporting on his work in recent years, are reporting he died of “heart failure”.

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.