Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,
The UK is not the only country with increasing doubts about the EU.
A Pew Research Center study on Euroskepticism Beyond Brexit shows a huge dip in EU favorability across the board.
France has an even lower overall favorable rating of the EU than the UK. The favorable score is 38% in France, 44% in the UK.
Today is a historic day for the corporate bond market: with the launch of the ECB's CSPP, Mario Draghi is now directly buying European investment grade non-financial bonds. This means that no longer will European corporate bonds trade based on their fundamentals, but purely on expectations of frontrunning future ECB purchases.
One month after Goldman strategists downgraded equities to neutral on growth and valuation concerns, the firm has turned up the heat on the bearish case with a report by Christian Mueller-Glissmann in which he says that equity drawdown risk “appears elevated” with S&P 500 trading near record high, valuations stretched, lackluster economic growth and yield investors being “forced up the risk curve to equities."
In an overnight session dominated by the latest political developments out of the US where Hillary Clinton officially claimed the democratic nomination, the financial newsflow focused on China's trade data, where exports fell 4.1% from a year earlier, in line with expectations, but imports dropped 0.4% from a year earlier, the smallest decline since they turned negative in November 2014, likely reflecting higher commodities prices but really driven by "imports" from Hong Kong which rose to $2.48b, the highest since at least 1999; and a 243% y/y surge in dollar term, also a historical high.
Submitted by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,
Two polls were recently released that call the European Union in question.
A poll in Italy reported that the Five Star Movement (a populist political party that wants to hold a referendum on whether Italy should remain in the European Union) was the most popular political party in the country ahead of local elections scheduled for next month.