Europe

"Everybody cut loose".. but be prepared to pay for it in Europe. As Martin Armstrong notes, if you dance in a bar in Brussels, you must pay a tax!

The patrons of Bonnefooi, a cafe in the center of Brussels, last week received a visit from a City inspector.

The inspector asked them to pay the “tax dance.” Yes you read correctly. Brussels has a “dancing tax” written in the 50´s and as the government needs money, they have “revitalized” this tax since 2014. 

The defeat of Italy’s establishment Prime Minister is the latest sign that a tectonic shift is coming to the European order: toward accommodating, rather than countering, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vow to destroy the globalist New World Order. Italians went to the polls on Sunday and voted down Prime Minister Renzi’s proposed changes that would have weakened the constitution, further eroded once proud sovereignty, and put nooses around Italian necks.

Submitted by Brian Cloughley via Strategic-Culture.org,

Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the world’s five «nuclear weapons states», a description officially recognised in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which lays down that «each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices…»

With the Italian referendum now in the rearview mirror, the market's attention focuses on this Thursday's second most important event, the ECB meeting on Thursday. Here the biggest question is whether, alongside the now widely expected extension of the ECB's QE which is set to mature in March 2017, and which most analysts believe will be prolonged until at least September 2017, Mario Draghi will also announce some form of tightening or tapering of QE purchases or an eventual formal ending of its asset purchases, as Reuters hinted in a trial balloon report last week.

As BofA's rates strategist Ralf Preusser writes in a note this morning, "not even a month since the US election and markets seem unrecognizable" adding that the Trump election represented a paradigm shift. Fiscal easing would take over from monetary easing and would allow for the dollar and rates to rise in unison, a trend not seen for a while.