Europe

European and Asian markets rose, while U.S. index futures were little changed, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average pushing for yet another record, as traders digested the Italian referendum news, await the ECB's Thursday announcement and reflect in a notably quieter overnight session.  Oil slipped from a 16-month high after 4 straight days of gains, as doubts emerged about how OPEC will implement the first supply curbs in eight years. European bonds gained with stocks.

"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.